A Winding Thread

Hosting Weaving Teachers

2011-09-18T13:02:00.000-07:00

I've held many jobs in my guild - newsletter editor, fashion show chair, vp, president, evening guild coordinator, program chair, among other functions. My absolute favorite of them all, which also happened to be the biggest job, was program chair.

There are many many aspects to this job - my least favorite memory is of loading the back of my van with a stack of 6 ft folding tables to haul to a workshop. (I'm getting too old to do all that heavy lifting!) I found it maddening and frustrating to try to find affordable places to hold workshops. (With city budget cuts, few rec centers have hours that work, and library space is expensive! I still wonder what other non-profit arts organizations do.) I didn't so much care for dealing with the logistics of workshops, but luckily, that part of the job was fairly concentrated in time.

But there were so many parts of this job that I thoroughly enjoyed. I love organizing information, so the computer part of the job was easy and fun to do. My absolute favorite memories are of hosting weaving teachers. I liked it so much that I hogged that aspect all to myself - never did ask anyone else in the guild to host a teacher during my stint. I was sure that if folks found out how much fun it was, they would want some of the fun for themselves. :-)

I'm all for taking on those big guild jobs when you've got the time and energy. For the first 15 or so years I was a member of my guild, it was important to me to work hard to help it survive and thrive. Now I'm in a phase of my life where my energy is committed to family things that need my time and attention, but I hope eventually to get back to doing more volunteer work with the guild.

So here's my Top Ten List of Good Reasons to Be Program Chair and Host a Visiting Teacher for your Guild:

As program chair, you get to pick the programs which most interest YOU.
When you host the teacher, you often get to take the workshop for free.
You get extra time to peruse the teachers samples or notebooks.
Weaving and spinning teachers are usually very funny people who like to laugh and are fascinating to talk to.
In the future, you get to drop the names of folks who are big fish in our small pond.
You find out hints and ideas of what other guilds are doing that might help your guild.
You get to hear the stories behind the making of the beautiful garments and jewelry that the teacher wears.
You add to your pool of people you are delighted to run into at the next Convergence.
You can get sneak peeks of upcoming articles, or new workshops.
And perhaps my favorite of all - fiber teachers often bring the COOLEST hostess gifts!!!

I was recently very lucky to host Jannie Taylor for our guild - she gave a marvelous program on shadow weave.

Unfortunately, I did not get to take her workshop (it was a Sun-Mon workshop, and on Sunday 9/11 I sang the Mozart Requiem and I couldn't get Monday off work.) But I so enjoyed getting to know her, and she gave me this absolutely beautiful towel.

So if you've got the time - definitely consider working on your guild's program committee. And if you've got the space - by all means offer to host a teacher. It is truly a delight!

Catching Up

2011-08-07T09:09:00.000-07:00

What a year 2011 is turning out to be. This feels like a "trial by fire" year - if you can get through the trials, you're stronger and you have proven your mettle. Or maybe I should say "when" you get through.

So what have the trials been?

Stress and loss.

The biggest stress has been our adventure with cancer. The day after Mother's Day, I took Eldy to urgent care. For several weeks, he had been weak and pale. We thought it was his new blood pressure medication. Nope. It turned out to be stage 4 colon cancer. He had surgery that week and the tumor was successfully removed (laparoscopically, amazingly enough!) A few weeks after that, he started chemo - a regimen called Folfiri, to be exact. It's not fun, but has turned out to be effective. His CEA level was at 20 early on - last week it was 3.0. This is amazingly good news! He's lucky to have an iron strong constitution - so the side effects aren't as bad as they could have been. A few days ago he gave in to the hair loss - we started by buzzing his head, then shaving it. Looks kinda cute, I think! Yesterday he put a little mustang sticker tattoo on the front. I know I'm overusing the word amazing, but his unfailing humor has really inspired me. :-)

The other major stress has been my job. I've been working very hard, fairly long hours, and the office politics have been exhausting. I had thought that being on a spiritual path might help me be immune to that sort of thing, but that's not the case. And of course, the hardest part is that now that I finally have my beloved loom room weaving studio, I've hardly set foot in there - too many chores to do when I'm off work, and not enough remaining energy for embarking on new projects.

As for loss - it started with losing Joy in March. That still hurts. Then we lost a niece to suicide, and my sister has lost several sister and brothers in law to cancer this year. One of my dear weaving friends just lost her husband to a motorcycle accident. I suppose the fact that I'm now 58 and have had so very little experience with loss before this year would indicate I'm very lucky. I was a Girl Scout - I should be prepared. But is it every possible to prepare yourself for loss? You don't really know how you're respond until you are going through it. No amount of speculation can make you aware of the fact that the hardest part of grieving occurs in the moments where you've forgotten about your loss, suddenly remember, and then can't breath for a moment.

But there's a corollary to the process - a very heightened appreciation for all that we usually take for granted. My relationship with Eldy now has an ease and intimacy that we've never had in 27 years of marriage. I'm so grateful for that, and I'm over the moon happy that the chemo is working. I'm making a special effort to notice and appreciate the many wonders in my life - the joy we felt yesterday sitting in the backyard on a lovely summer day, watching hummingbirds darting around "protecting" the feeders. Later, we sat out front in the driveway with our neighbors' son Logan, the navy pilot, hearing about his adventures landing on carriers. I pressed a shutter button in my head - to make a note and remember a special moment.
So, what I know is that life is good and precious. And I'll close with a close-up of the image at the top. I spent a lovely day in July with my friends Mary and Taryl at the Visions quilt gallery in Liberty Station, and found this dragon woven of natural materials. I was going to hang it in my loom room, but maybe I'll hang it near the front door instead - to remind me that treasures are woven from simple materials, and the greatest protection comes from love and creativity.

New Toy

2011-04-17T17:01:00.000-07:00

I recently treated myself to a new toy that I'd like to show you.

A while back, I came across a lovely double hole rigid heddle on etsy.com. I marked it on my Amazon.com universal wishlist, but when I went back ready to purchase, the one listed had been sold and no more were listed. So I emailed the seller, finnsheep, and whohoooo, another was made and listed.

Isn't this beautiful! It's very well-made, and is the perfect size and weight. Those holes are pretty tiny, though, and the perfect tool for threading them is a dental floss threader (made for folks with braces.) These come in handy so often, and for this, they are absolutely perfect. Here's a slightly out of focus picture of the floss threader ...

And here's a picture of the threader in action.

Next post (hopefully soon) will show the heddle in action.

And in case this has started heddle envy for anyone, I'll point you to the etsy shop for the maker
Fred Hatton, Woodturner and to his antique-spinning-wheels blog, and to the wonderful Weavezine article by Grace Hatton that first brought this type of heddle to my attention.

I love weaving narrow bands, and I love beautiful tools, and this is just the thing for creating that "all's right with the world" feeling.

Mystery Tool

2011-04-10T08:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was guild meeting and what a lovely day.

First, we just had a lot of rain, and to wake up to sunshine and oh-so-fresh air was divine.

Second, the program at our guild meeting was one of my favorite topics, given by one of my favorite weaving teachers. Jennifer Moore talked to us about Mathemagical Design. Here she is holding one of her fractal double-weave pickup samples. She combines an amazing design sense with a beautiful use of color that is just thrilling.

Another fun thing happened during the business meeting - I was given the following "tool" for free. The only requirement is to report back whatever I discover about its function. It looks homemade - you can see there is one hole drilled in the far end of the board, and two in the near end. the upright part consists of two pieces, with two holes drilled in each of them.

In between them, there is a lower piece of wood, and the top piece can be removed. It is connected with a bolt, and secured with a washer and wing nut at the top. In the second photo, you can see that top piece removed.

So what this is for? I thought maybe for clamping the end of a warp to use for tablet weaving, or perhaps for band weaving with a small rigid heddle. Or maybe it's used for twining? What are the holes for? Anybody know?

Lost My Shadow

2011-03-19T16:00:00.000-07:00

I guess I'm not very good at this blogging thing..... once again, it has been a very long time since I posted. I can give oh so many excuses.... the full-time job (thank you Universe for the opportunity to clear debt, and thank you for the brain cells that still work), the music ventures (still singing with the La Jolla Symphony Chorus - we're working on Bach's St Matthew's Passion right now, also starting a new 20 voice sacred choir called HeartSong Chorale - heartsongchorale.blogspot.com.) The result of all the busyness has been that I have spent very little time in my new and beautiful loom room. I still hope to change that, soon, real soon.

But that isn't where my attention has been lately. For the last couple of weeks, I have been consumed by grief. In the early morning hours of March 7th, I lost my shadow. My sweet poodle, Joy, passed away. I thought my heart would break.

Joy
1/3/1997 - 3/7/2011

I knew it was coming - for the last six months or so, she had gotten thinner and thinner. She still ate, and pooped, but her muscles were wasting. Someone had recommended that I add brewers yeast to her food, which I did for a while. But soon after starting that, she had her first seizure. I was feeding her a premium, well-balanced dog food, and I suppose the additional protein of the brewers yeast put a load on her kidneys or something, so I stopped adding it to her food. She had a few other seizures, several months apart. Most recently, she could barely walk on her back legs. When I took her for her walk (or really, just to check her smell-mail) I didn't let her walk on the concrete anymore. I carried her over to the greenbelt, let her walk on the grass and go visit the "dognip bush". She couldn't see very well, or hear very well, but to the last, her nose worked and she so enjoyed checking out all of the smells. And though she slept most of the time, she would still follow me around the house whenever I was home.

Sunday March 6th was my son Matthew's birthday - he came over for steaks and we celebrated his day. When he got up to leave, Joy gazed over at him from her perch on the couch, and he went over to her and said goodbye and patted her head. I cleaned up the kitchen, and as I removed the steak scraps, I cut up a few and put them on top of the food in Joy's bowl. When it was time to go to bed, I carried her upstairs and put her on the blanket nest in my bedroom where she liked to sleep.

But she wouldn't lie down. She kept pacing and stumbling, getting into strange tight spots and getting stuck. I kept picking her up and putting her back, but she wasn't able to settle, so I picked her up and carried her downstairs. She kept pacing down there, then began retching like she was going to throw up. I tried to support her, thinking she'd feel better after she got whatever was bothering her out of her system, but nothing ever came up but drool. Thinking her stomach was upset, I thought the steak pieces would spoil before she got to eat them, so I went in the kitchen to get them from her bowl and throw them away. She had already eaten them.

Joy laid down on the floor, and I laid down next to her, petting her and talking to her. She seemed uncomfortable and wasn't moving much. After a while, I picked her up and put her on the small couch, still petting her, and she seemed to relax a bit. By this time, it was 4:30am and I was exhausted. I decided to lie down on the big couch, and reached over to put my hand on her nose. She made a little cooing sound to me, and I made the sound back to her, and we did that back and forth 5 or 6 times. By then she seemed to have calmed down, and I laid back on the couch and fell asleep. When I woke up, she was gone.

I wish I had stayed awake to comfort her until the end. I googled about the drooling I noticed, and then read about the retching without throwing up being a sign of bloat, something I didn't know anything about. It wouldn't have changed the outcome, I suspect - it's a serious condition that often requires emergency surgery, something I don't think she could have survived. I wish I hadn't given her the steak scraps - most of her life, I was vigilant about not giving her any table food (except pieces of apple, that she adored, and I also always gave her the end pieces of bananas.) I'm guessing she wolfed the steak scraps down - a rare treat for a dog accustomed to kibble and milkbones.

I'm a very lucky person, I've realized - I'm new to this grieving thing, because I haven't had much practice with it. And I'm not doing very well with it, either. I've been able to go to work - only missed one day, and I only missed one chorus rehearsal. But it has been hard, oh so hard. One minute I'm calm and fine, and can talk about her with ease. The next minute, a wave of sorrow washes over me.

I regret that I didn't take more pictures of her over the years - I've got some, but not as many as I'd like. I wish I had taken a picture of her lying underneath the baby grand piano - she loved to lie down there while I played. I wish I had a picture of her lying down on the carpeted stair landing. She used to look at me from there like she was saying "Hey! Are you going upstairs or downstairs?! Make up your mind!"

Mostly, I'm very lucky to have had such a great dog - she really lived up to her name, and brought me great Joy. Her nicknames were Joyful or PoodleHead (that one was given to her by the trainer at her obedience class when she was a puppy, and it stuck.) When she was younger, we'd run around the back yard and play catch with each other. Our back yard has a retaining wall with a slope behind it, and she loved to run across the yard and take a flying leap up to the slope, and then run along the side and bark if there were dogs on the other side of the wall. She never was one much for fetching - if we threw something, she'd look at us as if to say "You expect me to do what?!"

We have an island in the kitchen, and she loved to chase around that, too. She'd steal food if you left it on the counter. A group of my weaving friends met here for lunch one day, and someone left a round of cheese near the edge of the island counter. It disappeared. Someone commented that is was to be expected, after all she was a French poodle.

Joy loved taking long walks, and I'd let her lead - sometimes it felt like she was my tow dog. :-) The Dog Whisperer would not have approved, but she already had me trained that way.

I don't really expect anyone to read this, but it helps to say it "out loud", so to speak. I miss her with all my heart.

Back(b)log

2010-11-26T15:55:00.000-08:00

It's been quite a while since I posted, and a LOT has happened in that time, so for the two of you who read my blog from time to time, I'll go ahead and start catching up.

The last time I posted, I had just moved my big loom into my new loom room, and got everything running, and even got a USB adapter to connect my Toshiba laptop to the dobby. Sadly, life has been pretty busy and complicated in the last couple of months, so I haven't done any weaving. Soon, real soon, and when it happens, I'll announce it here first. :-)

Also on the weaving front, the San Diego guild has begun meeting at San Diego Rug Cleaning Company - and what a delight! Instead of basketball noise, we have the ambiance of lovely color and texture and cool tools all around. (You can see Rebecca Smith giving a presentation on her artwork based on petroglyphs in this picture.)

So what has been going on? Well, that full-time job has cut into the playtime in a serious way, although it has also cut into debt in a big way, too, for which I'm enormously thankful.

On the music front, I've been busting my chops learning Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, which we will be performing on December 4th and 5th. This is probably the most difficult choral music I've ever sung before, so I expect to feel both joyful and immensely satisfied when we're finished! In addition to all that has been going on with the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, I've been working with Carl Martens to begin a new sacred choir in San Diego. Many, if not most, New Thought churches (and I go to a Unity Church, which is part of that movement) have contemporary music during the services. It's often soloists with a band, doing pop style music. There might be a choir, occasionally, but the choir sings backup for a soloists, doing..... pop style music. I discovered in the springtime that Carl has a great deal of experience as a choral director, and suggested to him starting a sacred choir, and it's going to happen! We've arranged for a place for rehearsals, and have scheduled auditions for the second week in January, and have a blog all setup. We are planning to have a group of 20 singers. I can hardly wait!

What else? I got my obligatory fall cold, and am just about recovered from it. I'm beginning to suspect sugar - I normally avoid it, but tend to indulge on Halloween (while handing out candy, of course). And I'm starting to realize that every year, I get my fall cold right after that. Maybe it's time to buy the non-chocolate (and therefore non-tempting) kind of candy to hand out.

Also, on the list of challenges - my beloved dog Joy is having a harder and harder time getting around. She's almost 15, and it shows. Her back legs aren't working very well, and she's getting very skinny. The good news is that she doesn't seem to be in pain, and she's still eating well. But walks are shorter in distance and take a lot longer. I'm glad I still have her with me, and intend to enjoy every single day.

So that's it from here. I've got several weaving related things I want to talk about (incredible customer service from Fireside Fiberarts, the new edition of Kati Meek's book, among other things) but that will wait for the next post. I promise not to wait so long next time.

Last, but not least, I'd like to say thank you to Sue, of Life Looms Large. Since she's started the color of the month posts on her blogs, I've found myself noticing my environment much more than I ever have before - and not just the colors, but seasonal patterns that are unique to this area. It's a nice feeling to be more aware of things I've previously taken for granted.

Murphy

2010-09-07T20:56:00.000-07:00

No pictures this time, but I do have an update.

I had an email exchange with someone at Louet - no real information available about the USB plug on my dobby box. This person said to go ahead and plug into it and try it, it couldn't hurt anything, but they didn't think there was any circuitry inside the box for that plug. Rather than go out and buy a USB-USB cable, I opted to take the safe route and buy a USB-serial adapter and just plug it into the serial plug on the dobby box and a USB port on my laptop.

I looked back through the WeaveTech archives - I mostly use Fiberworks PCW, so I was looking for their recommendation. They recommended a Belkin. So Sunday after church, I headed to Frye's. They were out of many of the USB-serial adapters, only had 2 brands left - one was Belkin, the other an off brand. It didn't mention Windows 7, but I thought (ha!) surely they have a Windows 7 driver I can get online.

Well, when I came home, I tried and tried. Tried installing one of the drivers on the CD that came with it. Tried finding a Windows 7 driver. Tried getting a Vista driver online and installing that. Googled for some solutions, and found some strange ones I wasn't willing to try. All in all, it was a hot and frustrating afternoon, with no luck.

That night, I decided to go online and order a new adapter - one guaranteed to work with Windows 7. I even found one that supposedly will work with Windows 7 AND Mac OSX10.x so I ordered it.

Just before going to bed, I decided to go back in the loom room, try it as plug and play, and voila - it worked! I decided not to cancel the order - I suspect I'll be glad for the other adapter at some point. But still, at least things are working in the meantime.

So this weekend, now that everything has been moved and is in place, I actually plan to wind a warp and get the big loom to work. I am thrilled with the prospect!

Whole Again!

2010-08-07T14:48:00.000-07:00

Yeaaaaaaaaaa!!! Today I reassembled my loom, and she is working fine!

I am so thrilled!!! I had baggies with doodads, labeled with my names for the parts, and happily, I still understood what I had written on the labels. I had notes on the order in which I took things apart, so I could just reverse the order to reassemble.

I have an ancient laptop that came with the loom. Next up will be to see if I can connect my fairly new Toshiba laptop. The ancient one works, but it is, well, ancient. Plus, the new one has wireless connectivity, and then I can get rid of the external floppy drive. :-)

This is a huge milestone, and makes me very very happy! Now to decide on what will be the first warp woven in my new loom room.

Loom Parts

2010-08-02T22:17:00.000-07:00

Well, yesterday I got the Megado taken apart and Eldy helped me carry the sections upstairs. It was iffy for a few minutes, but we were able to get everything in there. in spite of my needing to stop and pant for air a few times.

So here are the guts of my loom - waiting for a Frankenstein sort of resurrection.

The castle is sitting on saw horses (so right now, it's sitting higher than it will actually be.) The treadle assembly and uprights surround the castle, and you can see the cloth beam and dobby box in the foreground.

I was too tired when I got home from work tonight to start the reassembly, but soon, real soon.

A Purchased Dose of Loveliness

2010-08-01T14:22:00.000-07:00

I attended Convergence in Tampa on day passes, just like I did this year in Albuquerque, but there was one big difference. Two years ago, money was so tight that I just got to ooh and aah over all the wonderful stuff, but I wasn't able to buy anything. This time, I was able to buy a few things - most of them had been on my wishlist for a while, though a few things found me unawares. :-)

This photo didn't come out very well, but at the top you can see two skeins of hand-dyed tencel yarn from Just Our Yarns. Their yarns and dye colors are luscious, and I've coveted some ever since I first saw their wares at a regional conference in Riverside, California. The green/blue/purple skein is 30/2 tencel, and the purple/fuschia/red skein is 20/2 and they are gorgeous both to see and touch. At the bottom of the photo is a small bag - made out of recycled huipils, which appeal to me on so many levels.

Just Our Yarns Tencel skeins and Recycled Huipil Bag


Books, Bamboo and Shuttles

The second photo also contains a mix of planned purchases and nice surprises. At the top, you can see the 2 books I bought. I've been planning to buy a copy of Robyn Spady's book Handwoven Decorative Trim for a while, and was happy when I found it at the HGA booth. It's a slim book, but the photos are great and the writing is clear and I'm really looking forward to exploring this. The other book is a new one, just published by Margaret Coe, called Fit 2 Be Tied. This one I pre-ordered, paid with Paypal, and then just picked up in Albuquerque. I am *thrilled* with it. A few years ago, I was lucky to be able to read through Alice Schlein and Bahkti Ziek's amazing book, A Woven Pixel. Fascinating stuff, though most of it targeted at jacquard looms. (There is a chapter geared toward dobby looms, plus it has amazing information on using Photoshop.) I wasn't able to afford purchasing my own copy of the book, but have thought about it a lot since I read a borrowed copy. Well, this new book also describes using Photoshop (or Elements) for creating presets, but focuses on double two-tie unit weave (something I am also fascinated by, ever since hearing Madelyn van her Hoogt speak about it - I think that was at Convergence in Minneapolis in 1994.) Since I have Photoshop, and I have a 32 shaft dobby loom, this book is right up my alley, and fit in my budget, and I'm really looking forward to studying and working through it and seeing what I can come up with from my loom as a result! (I had a few posts a year or so ago about double-two tie designs - after reading a great article by Jannie Taylor.)

The bottom of that photo shows my other serendipity purchases. I love beautiful little shuttles, so the Bluster Bay shuttle jumped into my hand. The one below it is very neat - Hockett Woodworking, and it is an "end of warp" shuttle - very skinny low profile (and beautifully made, too.)

Last, but not least, my friend Ruth is making some new spindles and gave me one to try out (I'll include a picture of it in my next post.) I loved her spindle - it actually has a square whorl with a circle of copper - beautifully balanced and spins very very well. So, in spite of having a gigantic stack of bins filled with spinning fiber, my last purchase was a hank of bamboo in a luscious combination of blue and copper and white (color-way is called Blue Eyes). Yummy stuff!

So there you have it - my acquisitions from Convergence.

Loom Room Status? Yesterday was manual labor day - I moved tons of stuff and books into place, and the loom is getting filled fast - and the big loom isn't even up there yet! Yikes! Today, I'll be disassembling the big loom and starting to move it. With any luck, it should be up and running by next weekend. We'll know when it's history, as my husband often says.

Albuquerque

2010-07-25T17:23:00.000-07:00

I'm home after a marvelous week in Albuquerque. I did get pictures with my new little point and shoot camera, but not as many as I had hoped to get. My friends had gigantic fancy SLR cameras, though, and they got TONS of photos, and I'm hoping they'll share some of those with me. :-)

I didn't register for Convergence this year, and was too late to sign up for Complex Weavers - this is the first year they had online registration and sold out in a few days! Not good for me, but good news for weaving! But I have a group of dear friends - weavers and one quilter - that have been good friends since the early 90's - the days of the Crafts Forum on Compuserve. This trip was mostly our reunion, although we did purchase day passes to see the exhibits and roam the vendor hall. I did make a few purchases - I'll share those in the next post.

The first few days, ABQ was hot hot hot - bright sunshine and very dry. The city has beautiful vistas from almost anywhere you find yourself. It sits in a valley with mountains just east of the city. Our rental house was in a fairly new subdivision just west of the city - we had a great view looking east toward the mountains, overlooking the lights of the city at night.

This Sun happy face was on the front of our house - good symbol for Albuquerque!

One of our first excursions was to visit Petroglyph Park. It really is amazing to view these ancient carvings in the black rocks of the area. I'm not sure why my camera gave this one a rainbow sheen, perhaps because the sun was REALLY bright?!

From one of the trails at the park, looking south, you can see encroaching suburbia.

It's a shame the whole area can't be preserved. We did see some graffiti - which is really sad because there is nothing that can be done to repair the damage. Still, it was amazing to contemplate an ancient communication device. Times have changed. :-)

Starting to Move

2010-07-12T22:55:00.000-07:00

I'm so excited - I've started moving things into my new loom room! Here's the view so far, as you walk in the door. I haven't moved my books yet, but the boxes of Handwovens and Weavers magazines are in place. On the left you can see my floor inkle loom (which doubles as a warping board.) In the back right corner is my reed stand and the winding station with my electric bobbin winder. My plan as I start moving books in is to list them in my librarything.com collection. I started listing my books there, but stalled due to the effort to schlepp them to my desk. Now that they have to be moved anyway (and dusted off ) - this seems like the perfect time to *really* get them organized.

And this is a view that thrills me everytime I see it - I moved the metal shelves and the bins holding my yarn stash from the storage shed in the back yard to the closet, and they all fit!

Mostly weaving yarns on the left, knitting yarns on the right, and the middle stack is spinning fiber. I probably could spin and weave for the rest of my life with just what I've got in my stash. On the left you can see my takadai and marudai, and the warping wheel. In front is the bench I use with the David loom, and behind the tv tray is my spinning wheel.

I'm planning on moving the looms Saturday. There will be quite a bit of dismantling and reassembly that will have to happen, so it's going to be a big job. Then, all that is left is getting a worktable setup. I look forward with great joy and anticipation to enjoying my creative time in this room!

There will be one delay, though. On Sunday, I am flying to Albuquerque. I didn't register for Convergence, and I was one of the people who missed the Complex Weavers registration, but I am going to stay in a rental house with 3 of my dearest friends - we became buddies back in ancient times in the old Compuserve Crafts Forum, way back in the early 90's. Our friendship has blossomed over the years, with lots of shared additional interests besides weaving and spinning and braiding and quilting. I can't wait to see them face to face! We'll be getting day passes to see the exhibits and peruse the vendor hall at Convergence, with the highlight being getting to see Debbie's marvelous double weave piece in Small Expressions!

I feel like so many dreams are coming true for me this summer, and I am so grateful. I've been in a sort of limbo for quite a few years now - feeling painfully stuck, but something has broken loose and I'm back in the flow again! The bonus is that for many years, San Diego Creative Weavers Guild has been searching for a home. I served on the Vision committee a while back, trying to figure something out, but no matter what we tried, thing fell through. Well, last month we got to hear a wonderful presentation from Kay Blatchford, owner of Kay Blatchford's San Diego Rug Cleaning Company. You may remember from a previous post to this blog what a neat place that is - we had an excursion there last year with the Warped Explorers group. Well, during the business meeting, a report was given on the recent arrangements that fell through, and they offered us meeting space in their building, since we meet on Saturdays and they are off that day. They are even giving us an unused office to house our guild library. This feels auspicious, and once again, the answer to a dream many of us have held for a long time. I'm so thrilled and thankful - for Kay Blatchford's wonderful and kind offer, for the committee of members who have worked so long and hard to manifest this. Maybe this will be a shot in the arm for the guild, like my new loom room feels like a shot in the arm for me. :-)

Happy Happy Joy Joy!!!

New Loom Room Floor

2010-07-03T12:43:00.000-07:00

Eldy and Sam installed the new flooring yesterday, and I LOVE it!

Here's a shot looking across the room from the door. Eldy bought new baseboards and I painted those yesterday afternoon. He's going to install them later this afternoon. I've taken measurements of the room and of my looms and stuff, and am going to play with arranging things on paper before I actually start hauling my equipment in there.

And here's a shot looking from that back corner back toward the door.

This is something I've dreamed of for such a long time, and I'm so thrilled to see it become a reality!

Progress!

2010-06-27T17:48:00.000-07:00

Well, my new loom room is painted! The last session of painting was actually pretty much fun - with the window repaired and the room looking so much better, I can actually start imagining what it's going to be like when it is finished, and that thought is really exciting.

Here's a view looking back toward the closet. Plain beige color - navajo white trim (you an see that on the ceiling shelf above the closet opening.)

And here is the stack of boxes containing the new maple floor. :-) Eldy and Sam are planning to install that for me Friday. Looms should be moved by the 4th of July!!

And to continue with the colors of June thing.... here's a better photo of a jacaranda - I think the purple looks even lovelier on a gray day.

And last is one of my other favorite colors - the agapanthus begin to bloom in June, and are in full bloom by July 4th, which seems appropriate - they've always looked like fireworks blossoms to me.
P.S. There is a long hallway leading to my new loom room . Eldy suggested using it as a gallery wall for my weaving. That's fun to think about, too!

Colors and Change

2010-06-20T13:30:00.001-07:00

Between adjusting to full-time work and preparing for the recent concerts, it's been a while since I've posted here. Well, the concerts were a great success. We got standing ovations for both performances of the Benjamin Britten War Requiem, and the whole thing was a marvelous and amazing experience. The job is working out well - I really like the people I work with, and I'm enjoying the work. The hardest part is figuring out how to have time for the volunteer things I enjoy doing as well as the fun stuff. By the end of the week, I usually have cumulative fatigue that makes it hard to get much done over the weekend.

On the home front, I'm still in the middle of restoring the room that is becoming my new loom room. It's kind of hard to see much in this picture - Eldy patched the holes in the walls. We had a company come out and measure the broken window so the glass can be repaired (I think that's what the gizmo on the floor will be used for.) I painted the ceiling, and in a few minutes will start painting the walls. The new window should be installed within a few days. Then we'll buy the new Pergo flooring and install that, and Eldy is putting in new base molding. Then it will finally be ready to move the looms in. That in itself will be a big project - my Megado will have to be disassembled and then moved and reassembled. I've done it once before, when I first bought the loom. This time I'll have help so it should be faster and easier. I can hardly wait!

Now for a side bar. Sue, author of one of my favorite blogs - Life Looms Large - frequently has a "colors of the month" project. I'm not great with my camera, but since she started doing this, I will confess that I'm better at "noticing" the colors around me. :-) And this month I finally captured at least a few photos to share.

So here are the colors in my part of San Diego in June. I even captured them in sunshine! If you are familiar with San Diego, you know we experience what is called May Gray / June Gloom this time of year. We often have a heavy marine layer which makes things very humid, but keeps us nice and cool. By late afternoon, though, we get our beloved sunshine!

These are the typical colors you see in the landscape - sand, sagey green, and gray-brown bark.

We even used those colors when we painted our house - sand colored stucco, with sage green trim. (When we first moved in, there was no landscaping anywhere, and we called our house the sandcastle, so these colors seem especially fitting.)

But we do get some luscious colors in the landscape this time of year. Here's one of my favorites - the purple of the jacarandas that are blooming right now.

And the intense orange of cape honeysuckle that seems to be blooming almost all year round.
Stay tuned for the upcoming pictures of the loom room as it becomes a reality!

Change and Patience

2010-05-16T07:37:00.000-07:00

This will be another post with no photos - sorry about that. :-)

I'm finally settled in the new job. The first week was very rough (I had to resist the temptation to go out to my car and just drive home.) The second week was better. By the end of the third week, I was fairly comfortable, and confident that I can be a productive member of the team. Luckily, everyone has been friendly and supportive and very very nice, and I'm so thankful for that! It's been many years since I worked full-time outside of the home (I telecommuted for my last full-time position.) It's an adjustment!

On top of starting the new job, other big changes have been afoot at our house. My son Matt did move out - he's living in a lovely place with several roommates and is happy. Sam, my youngest son, got a new job, too - working at an auto parts store. He's only worked a few days, but apparently really feels at home there and is happy with his job.

Now to the issue of patience. Remember when I said Matt's old room will become my loom room? Well, that is still the case, but it turns out a LOT of work has to be done before that can happen.

repair two holes in the wallboard
repair one broken window
replace the ceiling fan (and probably the light tracks on the ceiling, too)
install new closet doors
paint
install new laminate flooring

So although the shell of the room is there, it's going to take a while to get it functional and ready for me to move my looms in. I keep reminding myself that yes it would be wonderful to move in now, but yes I will be rewarded for my patience. Having to do all those things nights and weekends will make it take some time, but my goal is to have a wonderful weaving studio by Bastille Day (my birthday.)

Unfolding

2010-04-24T09:50:00.000-07:00

two fuzzy spots, two tiny beaks
new life emerging in this nest
proud mary sitting very still
creation beneath her growing
God unfolding ever slowly

safe in stillness but not in flight
mama reclaimed as hawk repast
sometimes a wave does not reach shore
but early rolls back to its source
new life spark retreats from brown fluff

these forms will not take playful flight
nor hungry beaks call plaintively
yet from the stillness love gathers
back her innocent joyful lights
to fling to newness form unbound

Whistle While You Work!

2010-04-22T19:52:00.001-07:00

Yes! My background check is finally complete, all the paperwork is signed, and I'm cleared to start work at my new job on Monday! I'm a little nervous, a lot excited.

I feel like I'm about to become a real grownup again. :-) I am looking forward to meeting new people and working as part of a team. Maybe my reawakened brain cells will get me rolling in other areas, too.

Another interesting development is afoot - looks like my oldest son will be getting his own place and moving out in May. I'm a little sad about that - I will really miss him. But... :-D ... here's the good part. Right now, my big loom is in the dining room. The dining table is in the corner of the family room (where it has become the resting place of "stuff" as we come in the back door.)

So very soon, I will have a loom room! The big loom will move up there, and perhaps even the smaller loom if there is enough room. The dining table will go back in the dining room. I anticipate creating a wonderful weaving studio, and enjoying being able to entertain occasionally in the dining room. I've stumbled on some great worktables on the web - I'm thinking of purchasing some Ikea base cabinets and topping them with a wooden table top. Before I start on it, of course, I need to measure the room, the looms, and make sure I have enough space for everything. Having my own studio has been a long time dream, and it looks like it will become a reality soon. I hope so. :-)

Iridescence Sampler 2

2010-04-20T13:31:00.000-07:00

Here's the second sampler from the workshop - the one where we branched out from plain weave to see if we could achieve iridescence with other weave structures. The iridescence still shows up, thought not as clearly as it does with plain weave, in my opinion. We were to pick 2 weft colors from the first sampler - colors which gave good iridescence in that sampler, and which gave an effect that we personally liked. I had a hard time choosing, because so many colors had such a neat effect, but ended up deciding on blue-green and yellow-orange. I picked the first because I liked it so much, the second because I thought the exploration would be good for me. Both were colors which were split complements of one or more of my warp colors.

This picture shows 2/2 twill. Still fairly iridescent, since there's a balanced amount of both warp and weft colors. This isn't the greatest shot, since it is "head on."

Here's a 1/3 twill. The other side has the weft colors so dominant that I don't think you see much of an effect, though I did like the blending on this side.

Clasped weft was fun to play with, and the part below that in this image is 3 color iridescence - using both of my weft colors in the same shed. I think that may be my favorite. (And, as you can see, it's plain weave.)

Last, but not least, here's a crepe weave example. I liked playing with the crepe weave, which feels, in effect, like various ways of alternating plain weave and twill picks.

And to polish this post off, as Sue requested in the comments - here's a picture of the inside of the little needlecase. :-)

Iridescence Sampler 1

2010-04-18T15:29:00.000-07:00

Here's a picture of my first sampler from the Iridescence workshop with Bobbie Irwin. You can see a little of the effect here, especially at the folds. My warp colors were violet, red-violet and red. She had us weave 3" sections with each of 24 different weft colors - a color wheel of 12 basic colors, then a wheel of 12 alternate colors (some with slightly different blends, some tints or shades.) Since it can be almost impossible to tell what weft color was used in some sections, she had us save enough to make tassels to hang off the side of the sampler.

This image is darker, since I tried with the flash disabled - makes it easier to see the iridescence in some parts.

This little needlecase was given to me by a friend, Kathy S., years ago. Whenever I take it to a workshop, I get lots of oohs and aahs and comments.

The little shell is done in stumpwork embroidery, and I just love it. I mean - it's got a shell and it's purple, what's not to love! I'm no longer in contact with the friend who gave it to me, but another friend thinks she might have the instructions somewhere. I think I've figured out a way to do it, but I hope she finds the "real" instructions. (Looks to me like you embroider the 9 "spokes", then putting a bit of padding behind the shell, needleweave around the spokes, as if doing a God's Eye. I'll share here if I try that and it works.)

Next, I'll see if I can get some good pictures of the second sampler - the one that incorporated weave structures, and for which we selected 2 weft colors to alternate.

Glorious Colors

2010-04-16T17:02:00.000-07:00

What an amazing week I've had!

First, Bobbie Irwin gave a presentation to San Diego Creative Weavers Guild about using Space Dyed Yarns. Fascinating topic - and she had great pictures and lots of samples to look at up close.

Next, she gave a presentation to Palomar Handweavers on Iridescence. Again, she had an amazing selection of samples to pass around and discuss. That was followed with a 2 and a half day workshop, and oh what fun it was!

This started with my winning the color lottery - we were given 3 analagous colors to use for our warp, and they were chosen randomly. I got red, red-violet and violet. Whohooo!!! Definitely some of my favorite colors, so I was very happy. The picture shows the bouts pooled beneath my borrowed table loom in preparation for warping.

Bobbie created two color wheels of cones - these are the weft colors we used.

She had a huge number of samples for us to peruse and study, including this wonderful display, which shows all of the different color gamps. The most amazing thing was taking one out in direct sunlight - where the iridescence really popped!

Here, Bobbie is looking at the first sampler finished - Karen was weaving on a floor loom, in addition to being a speedy weaver in general. (Note the amazing variety of looms in the background - this is the weaving barn at the Antique Gas and Steam Engine Museum in Vista, CA. Amazing place!)

I've almost got my notebook organized - when I'm finished, I'll add another post with some pictures of my samples. As I often do after a workshop, I feel inspired and fortified and excited to get back to weaving again. I've already got a few very specific ideas of things I want to try. Feels good!

Hi Ho, Hi Ho

2010-04-03T08:50:00.000-07:00

No pictures today, although this weekend I should finish the first taquetea towel. I'm not super happy with it, but at least I'm making progress. (I'll share a picture here when I've cut off and washed that first towel.)

But that's not really the news I'm sharing in this post, as you can probably tell from the title.

In my past life, I was a programmer for many years. Ever since the last layoff and the dot com bust, I've been sort of adrift. I've had occasional contracts and have done some freelance web work, but nothing big and nothing continuous. A few years ago, I got a dream job - working full-time from home. Loved the work, too, but unfortunately, the client stopped paying me. Took them to court for the money they owed me for the final six weeks of work. Won the settlement, although it is unlikely I will ever see a penny.

A year and a half ago, I was on the short list for what I considered to be my dream job. Went through several rounds of interviews, and really thought I had it, only to learn otherwise. That was a very sad day.

So recently, I had a great interview - good people, good work (and java, my preferred programming language.) I tried to prepare myself equally for acceptance or rejection. After all, the benefit of my current lifestyle is an abundance of TIME, and the joy of living without the restrictions of clocks or calendars. And I truly do LOVE that aspect of my life. However, it is balanced by a serious lack of money. Plus, I end up not letting myself do "fun stuff" during the day (like weaving or reading) because I "should" be working or looking for work or something serious like that.

So although I do seriously envy friends who are my age or younger and have been able to retire, that's not my story. Folks with pensions can draw on them as soon as they retire, and so be unemployed with income. Those of us with IRAs or 401Ks can retire, but with no income until 65 without serious penalties. I'm so deeply grateful for this opportunity to jump back into the working world and be gainfully employed again. I'm more than a little amazed.

And here's my secret hope - maybe now that I will be "pulling my weight", so to speak, I'll actually get more spinning and weaving and writing and reading done, because now my non-work time will be all mine, and not hampered by amorphous guilt.

So I'll give a little whistle, take a deep breath, and walk boldly into this next phase of life.

Flower Fields

2010-03-27T13:42:00.001-07:00

Today is my youngest son's 19th birthday - Happy Birthday, Sam!

He, of course, is spending the day with his friends, so Eldy and I drove up to Carlsbad to see the famous flower fields up there. There are acres and acres of beautiful ranunculus blooms - every color you can imagine, and the rows seem to go forever. It's one of the spectacular sites to see in springtime in San Diego. (How's that for abundant alliteration?)

Here's a view looking back over the fields towards the ocean. You can just barely see the windmill in between.

This is looking down the "orange" rows - they seem to go on forever.
And here's the red, yellow and pink.
Here's one of me - enjoying the sunshine by the mauve and white rows:
And here's my husband Eldy, who was gracious enough to go with me, though didn't much want to linger. :-)

Amazing what all that color does for your soul!

They're Back!!!

2010-03-10T12:25:00.000-08:00

Yes, the hummingbirds are back, BIG TIME!

A week ago, as I walked out to my car, one humbuzzed me - it orbited my head a few times, then hovered in front of me for a bit. I love hummingbirds - did you know they are considered a symbol of joy! That seems quite appropriate to me.

Well, a few days ago, as Eldy was getting ready to leave for work, he called me to come to the front door, then walked out. Near the end of our sidewalk, in a canopy of vines (cape honeysuckle), there was a tiny hummingbird nest, with Momma sitting there, so very still!

Sorry the focus isn't very good - I tried to get as close as I could, and used the macro focus setting. Wish I had a newer or better camera, but I'll keep experimenting till I can get some good pictures. I'm hoping to set up a mirror so we can get a shot of the eggs next time Mama is out feeding. (Last year, we got a whole sequence of pictures of baby hummingbirds, from when they were tiny, til when they flew, but I never got a shot of the 2 little eggs.)

On a different note, but still speaking of Joy - you may know my beloved standard poodle is named Joy. Well, she's 14 now, and starting to show her age. Her back left leg gives her trouble and she stumbles from time to time. Last Monday, I was playing piano and practicing my singing, and heard her nails clicking on the pergo flooring in the family room, fast and loud. I figured she had gotten stuck or tangled in something and ran in there to help her. What I found was terrifying - she was having a seizure. It lasted a couple of minutes, and I comforted her and got her cleaned up. She walked around restlessly for about 20 minutes - couldn't get her to sit or lie down - she would come over and lean against me for a few seconds for petting, then would wander away. By the time that was over, she was her normal, cheerful happy self, as if nothing had happened. Interestingly, she wasn't stumbling as much, either.

Since then, I've discovered it's not a rare thing for an aging dog to have a seizure. When it happened, I was so frightened and worried that she was dying. I don't know how you make peace with this difficult phase of a pet relationship, so I just keep an eye on her, and cherish every day.

Cotton Pickin Spinning

2010-03-03T16:58:00.000-08:00

Back in the 90's, Joan Ruane came to San Diego to teach cotton and flax spinning. She's a great teacher and a wonderful woman. (My youngest son was in 2nd grade at the time, and adored Joan. He thought she was actually another grandmother that we had just forgotten to tell him about.) Hopefully, Joan will send me a copy of the picture I took with her camera of her and Sam,who is now almost 19 years old and 6'6". :-)

The guild brought Joan back to San Diego in February for a program on cotton - an afternoon workshop on spinning cotton with a tahkli spindle, and then a one day workshop on preparing cotton and spinning it on a wheel. I didn't sign up for the full day workshop, since I had taken that when she was here before, but I really enjoy her and did take the tahkli workshop as a refresher. I had a marvelous time, and even bought one of her spindles. I already had a tahkli at home, but hers are so incredibly well balanced that I couldn't resist adding one to my collection.
The picture above shows some of the other participants in the class, and that's Joan standing (black top and white scarf) helping someone.

This picture shows what I've spun so far (natural green organic cotton), and next to the spindle is my little support gizmo. For those of us with unlevel laps, these are handy. You sit with it between your legs, which gives you a support bowl for the spindle that won't fall off your lap.

The timing was auspicious, too. I ended up coming down with another deep chest cold, darned it all. Not good, but... I did get some nice spinning time in.

In the meantime, I had a grocery sack of cotton that was homegrown by my friend Jan Frazee. Another activity while I watched the Olympics and coughed was picking seeds out of the cotton. In my hand is the cotton from a boll, you can see a seed exposed that I'm about to pick out. To the left is a nice pile of fluff and above is a little pile of seeds. This is definitely the slow way to do the task, but does work well as a tv watching activity.

In other news, I'm finally ready to start weaving again. The loom has been warped for a while, but I needed a few things in place and finally got myself to start moving on it. I found the brackets I used to hang weights off the back for live weight tension and got it all set up. Found another shuttle to use for a lighter weft for hems, and most importantly of all, reviewed my notes so I could refresh my mind on what I was planning to do, oh so long ago. Better late than never, eh?!

Waterworld

2010-01-22T15:26:00.000-08:00

We've had drought conditions for so long, and water restrictions that got tighter and tighter, so this abundance of water has been astonishing!

Here's what our backyard looked like yesterday.

This is looking through the French doors next to my desk. Thankfully - we didn't have any trees fall. (Thought the green belt that runs by our house on the other side of the wall is littered with branches, as is the eucalyptus aroma.) No major leaks, either, although the rug under my desk was damp near the door, so some moisture blew in. We'll have to fix that. Much of the water has finally drained away, though we do still have a standing pool. It's probably time to have roots cleared out of the drain pipes, I suppose.

Sandra visiting SDCWG

2010-01-16T07:34:00.000-08:00

Here's a photo of Sandra before her presentation to San Diego Creative Weavers Guild.

Lynn is on her left and Taryl is on her right. The table is covered with Sandra's scarves - from her wood series and water series and fire series. They are just exquisite and it was amazing how the patterns seemed to change depending on light and viewing angle and proximity.

Sandra's topic was The Magic of Interleaved Threadings and it was truly fascinating! You can check out her blog at http://sandrarude.blogspot.com/ or her web site at http://www.3springshandworks.com/Textiles.htm to see more of her beautiful work.

Challenging Assumptions and Limitations

2010-01-10T21:04:00.000-08:00

I had hoped to post next about the delight of having Sandra Rude visit San Diego and give our guild a marvelous program called The Magic of Interleaved Threadings. It was absolutely fascinating, and augmented with a table full of gorgeous scarves. She topped it off with handouts including colored images of drafts! I was especially taken with her description of the inspiration for some of her work - a teacher had told her to find an element of nature that inspired her, and find a way to weave it. Now, this tickled me in particular because the very first weaving class I took, when it was time to plan our first project, I was asked by the teacher what I wanted to weave. "I want to weave water!" I replied. She gave me a funny look and suggested I think about it a while longer and let her know when I had picked my yarns and draft. :-)

The bad news is that apparently the batteries for my camera have reached the limits of their age, and they don't recharge properly anymore. So.... I wasn't able to get any pictures. Sandra let me take a picture with her camera, which she is going to email to me. With her permission, I'll post that here when I get it.

In the meantime, I want to talk about all this new year's stuff. I'm not making resolutions this year - not even the "in action" kind that I made last year (which apparently didn't take.) It's no secret that I've been stalled again, and for quite a while. Of course, not weaving doesn't mean I'm not doing a lot of other things, but it still bothers me greatly that I'm not getting any weaving done.

So... I've been thinking about my situation, and something occurred to me. I have some built-in limitations that I have not challenged in the past. Perhaps I could win some newly inspired activity just by challenging those unquestioned assumptions about my own limitations. Here are the two main ones that come to mind.

I am a person who does not enjoy wet-messy processes.

Okay, in the past, this has been true. I'm not much for painting, or for dyeing, or for cooking, for that matter. These are what I categorize as "wet-messy processes", and so I've tended to avoid them - justifying it by saying to myself that it is just the way I am. But why is that? And why can't that change? I don't know if I'll do anything about this, but I've put myself on notice that there may be some wet-messy adventures ahead of me!

I need large blocks of time to do anything creative - no 15 minutes here and 15 minutes there for me!

I have friends who will do all kinds of things in tiny bits of available time. I even have one friend who keeps her knitting handy and knits at red lights and in traffic jams! Me - I've always thought in the past that it was too hard to switch gears to do bits of things - that I need at least an hour of available time before I'll jump into something. But is that really true? And doesn't it reflect more a lack of preparation rather than a proclivity? What if I were to have some projects (a variety of them, because ironically, I *am* a magpie) already setup, with everything already at hand to begin work, maybe even with a post-it note telling me the exact next step to take. That would avoid the mental context switch that seems so cumbersome that I avoid having to make it.

I'm not promising anything, but I wonder what could happen if I became a person who can change focus at will and is oblivious to drippy messes? It's actually sounding rather fun and intriguing to discover the answer to that question!

And on a good note - at the Unity Center I attend, we start every year with a White Stone meditation. In ancient times, prisoners were given a white stone with their "new name", signifying that they had paid their dues and were now free to begin a new life. During the meditation, we're guided to find our own personal white stone word for the coming year - a quality, an aspect - something we want to manifest more in our lives. Each year, I go to that service with an idea already in mind for what I think my white stone word will be. This year, I thought it was going to be "acceptance" (a positive way to say non-judgment.) But, nope, something else came through in the meditation, and my white stone word for 2010 is HeartSong. And I love it. So although I'm making no specific resolutions - my goal for this year is to find and follow what makes my heart sing. I like that.

Brioche Boo Boo

2009-12-24T12:32:00.000-08:00

I've been doing some simple knitting lately - currently working on a brioche rib narrow scarf in denim blue Merino. I'm enjoying this stitch immensely, until I make a mistake.

For the first experiment with this stitch, I cast on and started knitting. Made a mistake, tried to rip it out and redo, but couldn't seem to fix it so you couldn't tell where the mistake row had been. (Should have checked with this page, which says to rip out to the row *above* the mistake, then rip out that last row one stitch at a time. I decided I had made the scarf too wide, so I just ripped out the whole thing, cast on with fewer stitches, and started again.

Last night, I noticed I had made a mistake in one of the edge stitches about 10 rows back. Eyes and brain are not at their best at night, so I just set it aside.

This afternoon, the groceries are put away and the Christmas preparations mostly done, so I decided to tackle the brioche repair.

Since this was an edge stitch, I ripped out each edge stitch back to the mistake, then a few more so I could figure out the path to take to do the repair with a crochet hook. It worked!

In this first picture, my finger is pointing to the place where the repair began. On this side, you can't really see anything, I think, I hope. On the other side, there's a slight difference, but not really very noticable, and definitely better than the hole that was there before. :-)

I'm feeling very pleased with myself, and more likely to use this stitch more often now that I know that mistakes can indeed be repaired.

Great Balls of Fiber

2009-11-11T12:59:00.000-08:00

My friend Mary is the coordinator for our guild's evening group. (Our guild meets the second Saturday of each month, and we also have an evening meeting on the second Monday night of each month.) She was looking for ideas for programs, and I remembered seeing a description of a neat project on WeaveTech - I think posted by Cathie from New Zealand? That post didn't include detailed instructions, so here's what I wrote up for Mary to send out to participants.

Great Balls of Fiber Challenge

The challenge is to a) clear out fine yarns you no longer want and b) transform those yarns into balls of really cool, unique yarns that can be used as either warp or weft, or for knitting or crochet.

Things to bring:

a ballwinder
a pair of scissors
cones or spools or balls of fine yarns - any fiber, any color, any amount
a binder clip (to use as a simple thread guide)
a paper sack (to keep the things you're winding from rolling all around the room, and to take home what you create)

What we'll do:
SETUP: When we arrive, we'll put all of the cones or balls on a central table, and each person will set up their winding station with their sack, binder clip, ballwinder, and scissors. Attach the ballwinder to the table, put a binder clip on the edge of the table, flip one leg out to use as a guide), and set the sack on the floor below the binder clip.

SELECTION: When everyone is ready to begin, you will go to the yarn table and pick a minimum of 4 yarns to combine into your own unique Great Ball of Fiber.

WINDING: Place your source yarns in the paper sack. Grab the ends of each thread, holding them together, run the new yarn up through the binder clip and attach it to the ballwinder. Wind a ball until the ball is either large enough, or one of your source yarns runs out.

REPEAT: Keep choosing new yarns and winding new balls until time is up.

And here's what they made! Sure wish I could have joined them. (I had symphony chorus rehearsal that night.) Thank you Chris for the photos! I can't wait to see what they make with their new yarns.

(P.S. The NZ guild that did this originally didn't let the yarn creators keep their yarns - they had a big auction, and if you wanted to keep what you had made, you had to have the winning bid! Great idea for a fundraiser.)

Book Review: Unexpected Knitting

2009-10-31T11:32:00.000-07:00

I consider myself mostly a weaver who occasionally knits. (This is a pretty amazing statement, considering how little weaving I've been doing lately. Hope springs eternal.)

Recently, I checked out a knitting book from the library, and I am COMPLETELY in love with this book! I'm definitely going to have to purchase my own copy, because it's one I know I will come back to again and again and again.

The book is called Unexpected Knitting, by Debbie New, and it is a feast in so many ways. The photographs are stunning and beautiful, but even better - it is full of the most incredible IDEAS. She discusses a variety of knitting design techniques, then for each one has a specific example of something to make using that technique. The techniques are:

Free form knitting
Scribble lace knitting
Swirl knitting
Sculptural
Virtual Knitting
Cellular Automaton Knitting
Ouroborus Knitting
Labyrinth Knitting

These range from easy and spontaneous to very complex, and yet she has a way of describing what's going on that makes it easy to see how each technique works.

I like some of her subheadings, too...

For those who like to jump right in
Learning to love your mistakes
An elegant muddle
The Better Mousetrap Sock and other sculptures
"Knitting" the impossible
Self-generating patterns
Playing with mitered rings
Long space-filling strips

Each techniques has its own gallery of photos showing the amazing possibilities she has explored in her work.

To cap it off, there's an Appendix with all the basic techniques you will need.

Let's just say if I were stranded on a desert island and I could only have one knitting book with me, this would be it!

No Visible Progress - Just Audible

2009-10-24T09:24:00.000-07:00

Okay, I know I'm in a stall - both with weaving and this blog, but truly, I am NOT catatonic. Things have been very busy lately, just not with anything for which I can produce visible evidence here. :-)

I've actually had two main focuses lately: symphony chorus and a study group I'm co-facilitating.
I'll stick with one of them in this post.

La Jolla Symphony Chorus
I saw a notice in a little neighborhood newspaper this summer announcing that the La Jolla Symphony was having auditions for its chorus. I checked out their web site, gulped at the requirements, and immediately sent an email asking for an audition time (before I could chicken out.) I sang in some pretty cool choirs in my college days, but that was back in the 70's! We have an occasional choir at the Unity Center, and when it fits my schedule, I sing with them, but if anything, that revealed to me the changes in my voice since my youth. Scary, sad.

And I LOVED singing in a choir. There's something utterly magical about it, and there's nothing more satisfying than those moments when you realize something incredible has just been created, and you are a part of it. It's the closest you can get to bliss without sex! So why I have let this part of my life languish for decades is beyond me. Anyway, back to the audition.

I was surprised to get an immediate response to my audition request, so the day and time was set. I downloaded the practice theory quiz (which surprised me by how difficult it was) and began practicing a Brahms song. (You had to prepare one song to sing - either an art song or a piece from a musical. I definitely don't have a solo Broadway type voice, so I chose an art song.) I practiced and practiced. I freaked and freaked, wondering if it was going to be possible to achieve a presentable voice in time. The day before, I looked up the translation of the song I had prepared, and realized it was a man singing about a woman. I freaked some more, changed my plan to a very simple Italian song (Caro Mio Ben.)

The day of the audition, I did some vocalizing in the car on the way there, but nothing big, since I assumed they would warm us up as a group, then call us back individually for the audition. Boy, was I wrong. I got there and was handed a quiz. I sat down and started working on it, trying to keep my anxiety at bay. After a few minutes, I was tapped on the shoulder and called back to the rehearsal room.

The first tester started by playing several short melodies and asking me to sing them back. No warm up, just dive in. It went okay, though my voice was wobbly from nerves. I did okay on all but one of them, and got that one after a few repetitions. Then I was asked to sing a series of six melodic lines written on a sheet of music. Again, I did okay on all but one of them - couldn't seem to sing a sixth, in spite of the reminder of "My bonny..." - did the Goldilocks thing - sang a fifth, then a seventh, and didn't get the sixth until he played it on the piano. :-( I don't remember everything, or in what order things happened, but I think this same fellow had me sing the alto line of a hymn. That went by quickly, but I think I did okay. Back to the table in the hallway to work on my quiz.

I went through the quiz, doing the easy parts (not many) and working to contain the anxiety beginning to brew. Soon, I was tapped again.... off to the rehearsal hall. The director sat up in a seat in the audience area, the accompanist introduced herself - a lovely, very kind woman. She smiled and commented on my celtic knot necklace. I handed her the music for my song. And.... with no warm up, we launched into the song. It was thankfully short. I was a bit breathless in a few places. I thought my voice sounded terrible, but just kept trying to breath deeply and hang in there. I was given a sheet with We Wish You a Merry Christmas and asked to sing it. I did. Still fearful - it was right at the part of my range where I have a break in my voice and have to be careful. After a quick run through, I was asked to sing the version at the bottom of the page, which had lots of markings. That went okay, too - well, at least I was able to indicate I could understand the markings, even if my voice didn't sound very good.

As we walked back to the hallway for me to finish the theory quiz, the director asked me a few questions. I mentioned that my youngest son just graduated from high school, and when I saw the notice for the audition, it seemed a good time to try to return to something I left behind in my life that I dearly loved. I finished the quiz, and came home, went to my room and threw myself on my bed and sobbed for two hours. I was embarrassed, but mostly, I felt bereft. I was convinced that I had sounded terrible, and that this was a dream too long deferred that had died.

The next afternoon was when they were going to give results. When I got home from church, Eldy gave me a message to call the coordinator for the chorus. I called and got an answering machine. Did lots of deep breathing, and a few hours later, I tried again. She answered. I was astonished to hear her say "The director would like to invite you to join the chorus in the alto 2 section." I couldn't believe my ears! When I went to tell my husband, he had a big grin on his face, so I knew that he already knew. Boy, is he good at keeping a secret!

I've been to four rehearsals now, and they have been both scary and exhilarating. At the first one, we sight read two pieces, and I was astonished. I asked the woman next to me (who I shamelessly followed) if they had sung those pieces before. No. And yet, they all seemed to know their lines flawlessly. They even watched the director and followed him, while sightsinging. Amazing!!! The second week, the woman I had sat next to wasn't there - she ended up sitting in the back of the room away from everyone because she said she had been sick. Then, the back row of women I was sitting in was asked to move to the front to make more room for the men. So... not only did I not have the person I was following next to me, but I was in the front row. Luckily, I had practiced a LOT, and it was fine. In fact, it was more than fine. Normally, I don't get to stand in front, because I'm tall. Well, when you are in front, you hear all the voices blending behind you, which is a lovely feeling. In the rehearsals since then, I've returned to the back row. I know I'm okay now. I still don't know that many people, but slowly but surely, I expect to make some dear and deep friendships.

The work we will perform in December is the Bernstein Mass, and I will admit that it is probably the most difficult piece of music I've ever worked on. So I'm stretching a lot, in so many ways, and I'm very very happy. I'm also loving technology - I have the music in my little iPod shuffle, and listen to the full score while sitting at the piano, so I can play my part when I'm not sure about it. How cool is that? The only problem is that the earbuds started aggravating my tinnitus, so I'm taking a break for a few days, and found some inexpensive little speakers on ebay.

I am deeply grateful for this experience. The music we are singing is incredible, the director is absolutely fantastic, and I am very lucky to get to sing with a group of such wonderful singers. This is the best example I've had in a long time of the great reward for walking through BIG FEAR.

I'll post later about my study group, and about my weaving pondering. I loved Sue's latest blog post - definitely lots to think about there! Maybe those lines of thought will even get me back weaving. I hope so. In spite of my other bliss, I've really been missing it.

Another Fun Thing - Rug Repair Field Trip

2009-09-30T14:51:00.000-07:00

Another weaving friend - Judy L - arranged for our Warped Explorers study group to have a tour of a very neat place called K. Blatchford's Oriental Rug Cleaning, Repair and Restoration. We were each given a folder of information, and then Dana took us around, showing us each process that they perform. It really was fascinating!

We ended up in the repair room. This photo shows Kay, the owner, telling us about her business, and Leslie on the right, the one who does the reweaving. All the yarns used to do the knotting are hand-dyed to match the rug being repaired.

This shows the area where they wash rugs. They don't use any chemicals, just a gentle shampoo. Water is pushed up through the rug. For delicate rugs, they just squegee off the water. For the ones that can take it, they have one of those rotary scrubbing rug cleaners.

After the rug has been cleaned, it holds a LOT of water, so they run it through this giant wringer to remove as much water as possible. Then the rugs are laid out, right side down to protect the nap, to dry. Some of them can be dried outside in the sunshine, some are kept inside, with drying machines setting on top to accelerate the drying process
.

This is the storage area. They provide a storage service for their customers, which involves rolling up a rug and placing it in a Tyvek sleeve.

Here's Leslie in the repair room. You can see the wall of wefts hanging behind her.

At the other end of the repair room, you can see people working on fringes. Sometimes they simply reknot. Sometimes they add a new fringe - either tieing in a new fringe, or sewing on a commercial fringe. Sometimes they just do a rolled edge, depending on the rug's style and condition.

This is my favorite photo. Leslie has needlewoven in new warp and weft in the area being repaired. Once that is done, she ties in the knots, matching the design of the rug.

I was really grateful that Amy M took pictures - I forgot my camera.

P.S. Sue, we actually do get quite a bit of fall color here. When the trees change - I'll post some pictures of the liquidamber trees (aka sweetgum.) Not quite as glorious as maples, but they are lovely! Here's a post from last fall.

Hint of Fall

2009-09-28T16:21:00.001-07:00

I'm still not weaving, but I'm seeing little hints of fall, so hopefully, soon!

For many years, I called these "bouquet trees", because at this time of year, they look like they have bouquets of color tucked in. I learned last year that these are Chinese flame trees. The "bouquets" are clusters of reddish seed pods.

In the meantime, a lot has been going on.

First, I'm am still surprised, and incredibly happy, that I was accepted into the La Jolla Symphony Chorus. I auditioned a few weeks ago. It was hard - lots of sight singing, singing a prepared song, and a 3 page *hard* music theory quiz. I came home feeling let down, thinking I hadn't sung well enough. After all, it's been 25-30 years since I have done anything like this. So getting accepted was a double thrill, because it means this dream didn't get deferred too long, and didn't die. :-) The first rehearsal is tonight, and I can hardly wait!

Other fun things have been happening. I've met some new friends through facebook. One of them is an alpaca rancher out in the high desert in Anza, CA. This past weekend was National Alpaca Farm Day, so I drove out there with Judy H, one of my weaving guild friends. It was fun to meet Julie Roy, the owner of the place, to see all the neat critters.

Here's a pic of Julie, talking to some of her visitors.

The alpacas are strange looking, but so mild-mannered, and the range of fleece colors was amazing. Aren't their faces sweet?

Very soft with nice crimp - excellent spinning quality fiber! I didn't purchase anything, though I was tempted by a bag of fawn-colored roving, and some amazing alpaca/copper socks!
http://www.alpacasav.com/alpacastore.htm

Here's Judy...

and here's me, feeding treats to the boys...

As we were leaving, a blue jay followed us! He sat on the post in front of my car, then jumped to my windshield, then to the top edge of my opened car door! I grabbed my camera, but by the time I turned it on, he had jumped to the ground next to my car. Bold blue jay!

Furoshiki

2009-09-12T14:10:00.000-07:00

No, still not weaving, in spite of having two warped looms, ready and waiting. The weather here has felt like being in one long continuous hot flash, and I just haven't felt like weaving.

This post is about somebody else's weaving :-) and an idea that makes great use of narrow fabrics when you've already got too many scarves.

You have lots of options to try - narrow hem the edges..... create a lining the same way you make the body and hand stitch the lining into the bag. Easiest of all, you can stitch the lining to the fabric all around the entire rectangle. Then attach ties at the far edges of the a segments, and the far edges of the b segments, and tie them together. Instead of seaming, you can butt edges together and zigzag over the join.

For the handle, you can use a kumihimo braid, or a tabletwoven or inkle band, or even just braid together some shoelaces. :-)

Any other suggestions?

Naked and Knitting

2009-07-24T15:35:00.000-07:00

Not me - aren't you relieved. :-)

I'm still resisting weaving for some strange reason. Like I'm waiting for some giant cue from the sky or something. It bugs me, but it is what it is, so I guess I'll wait till this resistance fades.

Plenty has been going on. I had my day in court last Friday. It was unpleasant but... I got a judgment in my favor. Not sure how much good that will do, since the company that owes me this money is apparently in dire straits. The judge was more sypathetic to them - which was really frustrating, but I keep reminding myself, I got the judgment, and that's all that counts.

Now to the good stuff. My birthday was Bastille Day - I had a marvelous time! My friend and neighbor Ann Marie went to my favorite museum with me - the Mingei in Balboa Park. We had lunch in the outdoor cafe by the art museum and just had a marvelous time! The Sunday before that, I had a fun lunch with my spinning buddies, Mary Dawn and Taryl. Taryl brought a delicious white chocolate and fruit cake.

It's been hotter than usual here in San Diego, and weather whimp that I am, I've definitely been in a low energy phase. Mary took me to a Padres game this past Sunday - it was Stitch and Pitch day - got this cool bag, started a simple knitting project to have something to take with me. We rode on the trolley - missed one exchange so we got to the game late, but that was okay. It was my first time riding on the trolley ( I live north of San Diego and it doesn't come this far up.) The Padres had a miserable game, which apparently wasn't a big surprise these days. Still, it was a fun afternoon in the sun. I like this simple scarf I'm working on - still using the turquoise alpaca I used on the last project, but this time I'm knitting a narrow lace scarf with a sort of feather and fan stitch.

And for the naked part - poor Joy has really suffered with the heat since her curly coat had grown so long. The groomer had a cancellation yesterday, so Joy got a super short summer cut - hence the nekkidness. Sure wish I could get my hair cut and look suddenly skinny.

Shoelaces

2009-07-11T12:32:00.000-07:00

Our guild doesn't have meetings in July and August, but we still have access to our rental space, so often, Bev, the education chair, will line up classes. I like to do cardweaving - the American name - same thing as tabletweaving- so I decided to teach a class on making Tabletwoven Shoelaces after seeing the cool article on Weavezine on Inklewoven Shoelaces written by Daryl Lancaster's daughter Brianna.

I prepared kits in baggies - each containing warps for 2 shoelaces, 2 EZ Bobs for weft, a loop of thread for securing the far end of the warp, a safety pin to secure the near end to a belt, a binder clip to hold the cards secure when you're idle, some toothpicks to even things out at the start, an index card with an arrow on it (used to keep track of which direction you're currently turning, in case your mind wanders), and last, a piece of waxed paper with 4 little squares of clear packing tape (for wrapping the ends after weaving.)

I started by giving a demo with my giant cards so everyone could see the twining that happens with tabletweaving.

Then I got everyone setup - the loop of thread secured to the support bar of the table with a larks head knot, then with another larks head to capture the knot at the end of the warp. The near end of the warp was tied in a knot and safety-pinned to the belt (or around the belt, if necessary.) We wove in a header of toothpicks to even things out, then launched into the weaving.

Here's Linda and Mary...
and the other Mary and Joyce...

And Karen and Taryl...

After weaving for a while, I had everyone take a break, and talked about some of the options - 2 vs 4 cards, size of threads used, options for holding the weft, different turning patterns.

All in all, it went pretty well. Turns out the EZ Bob thingies weren't ideal for holding the weft threads since I had probably overfilled them and the thread was fairly fine compared to knitting yarn that you usually use these for. Floss bobbins might be a better choice. I had everyone using two wefts - a trick I learned from my friend Ruth MacGregor (www.spinningforth.com) which makes it easier to tug on the wefts to keep the edges neat and tidy. I also suggested they keep a finger in the shed until they are ready to turn so that the band doesn't tend to twist or flip over.

It will be interesting to see how many of them bring their finished shoelaces to the September guild meeting. :-)

My looms still wait patiently.

Looming

2009-06-25T12:21:00.001-07:00

When you lose a friend, you tend to remember previous losses. In 1996, I lost a dear weaving friend named Kay, from the Compuserve Crafts Forum online community (perhaps the first of those.) We had a weaving swap in her honor - the goal being to move out of our comfort zones and learn something new - to use a new piece of equipment, a new fiber, a new weave structure. My contribution was my first network draft design, woven on my new at the time Louet Magic Dobby Loom, using linen, which I had never woven with before. The design looked like little angels to me. I actually wove this without the mirrors in the threading and treadling, so it looked more like a grid of angels. If I ever weave this again, I like having a ring of angels with a diamond in the middle. :-)

In addition to sending samples, I also sent a poem which I wrote, a poem about loss and love.

Looming

I weave my life
on a warp of friends and family
using weft threads of joy and pain.

A warp thread breaks.
I sadly replace it,
glad that it will always remain,
firm in the fabric of my life.

And I remember to delight
in the pattern unfolding before me now,
and treat my warp with care,
cherishing its bright shining possibilities.

Farewell Verda Elliott

2009-06-24T15:35:00.001-07:00

Verda Elliott passed away Monday morning. Her daughter Barb said her death was peaceful and calm. I'm so grateful for that.

I first met Verda in the early 90's when she moved to San Diego. Shortly before that, her articles on symmetry had appeared in Shuttle Spindle and Dyepot. I was absolutely fascinated with those articles, and ecstatic when I found out she was moving here. I emailed her to welcome her and invite her to join the local guild. I tried not to gush too much - to let my enthusiasm come through without putting her off. She was charming and kind - sold me a copy of her wonderful book. She did become an active member of our guild, giving several programs (I think my favorite was on moiré patterns) and she attended many, if not most, of our guild meetings. For several years, she was active on the program committee.

Verda was one of the most knowledgable weavers I've ever met. She was a member of a small study group in our guild called Warped Explorers. Frequently, when we were choosing new topics to study or discuss, Verda would offer to bring notes and samples from classes she had taught. She was always willing to answer questions or to help solve problems. And what I'm remembering right now is that she almost always had a smile on her face. I'm a big hugger, and was always tickled that she was such a joyful hug recipient.

Verda, in spite of how much she already knew, was also always interested in learning something new. In the picture above, she's working on a project in a ply-split braiding workshop that Linda Hendrickson taught in San Diego a few years ago. She and I chose slightly different colors, and were amazed at how radically different the results were.

Verda hasn't driven in a while, and often we got to enjoy her presence at our meetings thanks to Gay Sinclair and Rosemarie Dion, who would give her rides to the meetings and then take her home afterwards. Gay and I each visited her last week - I could always tell when Gay had been there, because there would be a vase of her roses with the loveliest scent. On the wall were pictures of her family members - the kids, the grandchildren she adored, and her husband Jack who passed away last year. Her daughter even brought in one of her framed weavings. We had a long chat the last time I saw her. In spite of her physical discomforts, she still had her sense of humor - telling me a story about a weaving friend who had been hospitalized and was trying to let someone know about things to take care of and let them know that the dogs were in the closet under the stairs. They weren't actual dogs, of course, but what we weavers refer to as the failures that get cut off the loom before completion because we've given up on them. :-)

I am glad that she is free and peaceful and unencumbered. I know that when she moved to San Diego, there were friends she left that were happy for her, but were sad and missed her. That's how I feel now - happy for her, glad to know she is with Jack and so many other loved ones, but sad for myself and her daughters Barb and Jan and her son Dan, and for those grandchildren who will miss having such a fun grandma. And I miss her.

Stalled

2009-06-20T08:09:00.000-07:00

Blogs are usually used to report what we have "done", so I'm going to try to use mine to shame me back into action. I seem to have completely stalled.

I can't blame it on life demands. My husband was in the hospital last week for surgery on his foot - he's home now, on crutches, and no longer needs much help. I don't currently have a full-time job. My kids are 24 and 18 and I don't really see much of them. There's always a ton of laundry to do, but that doesn't count since I actually like doing laundry.

Maybe the May Gray / June Gloom that we get in San Diego contributes to it. Maybe it's having recently learned about Spider Solitaire and the subsequent addiction. Maybe it's just a fallow time. Who knows. It matters less what has caused this than what I can do to snap out of it.

So... here I am setting a goal for myself. By next Saturday, I intend to post here that I have woven the first tea towel and finished the inkle warp. I will also finish assembling the kits and samples for the Tabletwoven Shoelaces class I'm teaching in July.

If I have not done these things this week, my next post will be a ridiculously silly picture of myself. There... that should do the trick. I've often said I need the threat of humiliation to get anything done....

An Explosion of Sorts

2009-06-11T13:08:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been a long time since I last posted. I have always thought Nov/Dec is the busiest time of year, but this year, May/June has been hopping! This picture of an agapanthus blossom in my front yard captures the feeling - an explosion of budding flowers. This year, the buds started appearing back in May. That's pretty early - I've always thought of these as my "fireworks" flowers, since that's what they look like, and they usually bloom around July 4th.

I got the David loom all warped up for the next project - TaqueTea Towels. I will be weaving taquete towels with a teapot/teacup design (posted previously). But.... things have been so busy that I haven't had a chance to sit down and actually weave, so the loom is waiting patiently.

So.... what have I been up to? Well, although I don't really have any pictures of the event, I demoed inkle weaving and spinning at a local elementary school for their Gold Rush Day event. It was a lot of fun - the kids were ecstatic that I actually let them try both weaving and spinning. These were 4th graders - the perfect age for learning fiber techniques. A friend who teaches at the school said spinning and weaving were the hit of the day. :-) Never miss an opportunity to help create a new spinner or weaver. Here's my floor inkle loom, with about half of the warp woven.

And here's a closeup. You can see it's a super simple pattern.

My best spinning buddies - Mary and Taryl and Dawn - came over one Sunday afternoon for lunch and wine and an afternoon of spinning. Here's a picture toward the end of the afternoon, when we had stopped spinning and were oohing and aahing over the cool stuff on Taryl's iPhone.

And here's the CVM I've been spinning.

Last weekend, the four of us got all gussied up in our costumes and demoed at a lovely event in Old Town called Ladies Day, which is held the first weekend in June each year. From left to right - Dawn, Taryl, Mary, and me.

A woman came by doing period authentic hairdos - here she is working on Mary's hair, with Taryl watching.

And here's Dawn, wearing a bonnet and a big grin, and spinning away.

Let's see, then there was the chanting activity I led at a retreat in Descanso for the Unity Center. Ommmmmmmmm.......

And just to show that *some* are still at leisure, here's my beloved poodle Joy, luxuriating on the sofa like the queen of the castle that she is. She's doing pretty well for 13 and 1/2 years old!

Visitors

2009-05-15T14:40:00.000-07:00

I don't have anything weaving related to post today, primarily because of my recent visitors. Last week, a pesky little cold virus moved in for a while. Thankfully, it's now gone. And come to think of it, the gift of small bouts of sickness is the opportunity to sit, rest, watch the backlog of DVDs from Spiritual Cinema Circle that have accumulated unwatched. I guess it really is true that even the bad stuff holds something to appreciate.

I've had another little visitor lately, too. For about a week, I've heard this little tapping sound on the window to our home office. It's usually little double taps, then silence, then another double tap. A strange little bird, probably a sparrow, has been visiting. He comes to one window under a tree, hangs on to the screen, cranes his neck as if to check me out, then flits away. He bounces from one branch to another like Tigger, then flies around the corner to sit on a piece of metal outside another window. That's where he taps on the window pane. It's embarrassing to see how dirty the window is here.

It's funny - most of my adult life I haven't paid much attention to birds, and now they keep popping up. When I was a young girl, I tried to rescue several birds. We had a big picture window and they would hit the window and lie stunned on the ground for a while. We had cats, so I felt compelled to try to help them. Once I even raised a tiny baby bird - taking it with me everywhere and feeding it every 2 hours. When it was big enough, I left it at home in my room. Sadly, I got home from school one day to discover it had learned how to fly, and had flown into my bedroom door and died. For a long time after that, I refused to play outside, petrified that I would encounter an animal that needed my help, and that I wouldn't be equal to the need.

But that was a long ago grief, and now this visitor seems more light-hearted - as if he's tapping on the window, suggesting perhaps I would prefer to go OUTSIDE and play?

On another note, I've been seriously procrastinating lately. I needed to file a claim in Small Claims Court up in Orange County against a company that still owes me for work I did last September. They kept saying they had an investor coming on board and "within a few days we'll have the money and you're at the top of the list for payment." But they've been saying that since January, and even my patience has limits. I don't know why I was so afraid of filing, but today I finally moved through that fear, and was even able to file online. Very easy. And now it is DONE. Lots of creative energy gets freed up when you tackle something you've been delaying for too long.

Tap tap. I'm being beckoned.

Studio Envy

2009-04-27T10:30:00.000-07:00

Serious Studio Envy, that is. Currently, I have my big loom in the dining room - with boxes of stuff for other crafts piled around the loom, and one area with my warping wheel, floor inkle loom and takadai. The spinning wheel lives on the hearth in front of the fireplace mantle in the living room. My fiber stash is in bins in a storage shed in the back yard. My small loom is in a corner of the family room. (Because the big loom is in the dining room, the dining table is in another corner of the family room.) This means that when I need to use something, I have to dig it out, use it, and be sure to put it away. Not fun.

For several years now, I've dreamed of getting a studio. Wherever I go, I seem to be using the back part of my mind to evaluate spaces -"oooh, now that would make a wonderful studio!" "oooh, look at all that space!" I've gotten the issues of Cloth,Paper, Scissors on crafts studios, browsed online to see storage ideas for crafts. I heart Sara's yurt big time. Ditto for Verda's second floor studio with one wall of windows, and one wall of cabinets, and a huge worktable in the middle.

The other day, I got to see my friend Gay Sinclair's studio, and it fits my dream image to a tee! She let me come over and take a few photos (and gave me permission to use them here.) I intend to put them on my treasure map for the coming year (aka visioning board) and see if I can manifest something like that for myself. Who knows, my beloved 24 year old son might decide he's ready to launch out on his own, and I can transform his room. We'll see. But back to Gay's space...When you walk in the door, to your left is a closet wall with folding doors. Adjacent to that wall is a wall of windows with cabinets below. In the space in front of the doors is the most *amazing* worktable. The top is 4' by 8' - the size of a standard sheet of plywood. On the side you can see here, she's got shelves for notebooks and stuff. There's a cutout area where she's got her sewing machine. And here's a view of the other side of the table - this one has lots of drawers.

On the other end of the room, there are French doors to an enclosed patio area. Sitting out there, you get a beautiful view of the ocean and that magical sea smell that wafts on the breeze.

I suspect there are several reasons this appeals to me so much. I adore french doors, for one thing, and lots of natural light. I like white walls and woodwork, and light colored woods. (My photo of the cabinet/window wall came out too dark, though you can see one corner of the cabinets here.) Also, there are some amazing "items of interest" - Gay and her husband Bob collect amazing ethnic items, and their home is a feast of fascination.

Gay's loom is downstairs in another room, though her table loom is up here, and I imagine this is primarily her quilting space. I love it, though, and I love the feeling I get looking at these images.

(P.S. She has a rose garden in the patio you walk through to enter the house, and the fragrance of her roses is amazing!)

Slow But Sure

2009-04-25T17:33:00.000-07:00

I got the warp beamed on the David loom, then went to look for my 8 dent reed. I could *swear* I bought one after the double weave workshop Jennifer Moore taught here a few years ago. Darned if I could find it, though. I have an 8 dent reed for the big loom. I had an 8 dent reed for the table loom, but after I sold that, I also sold the reeds on ebay. But alas, when I searched through my 36" reeds, I have 20, 15, 12 and 10 epi. No 8.

Thank heavens for friends. Gay Sinclair loaned me her reed, so I'm back in business. I just finished threading and I'm getting ready to sley the reed. While I'm at it, I thought I'd share a few pictures.

One of my favorite things about Louet looms is the built-in raddle on the castle. But my favorite use for it is shown here - I hang cords on either side of the loom from the raddle, and use the cords to hold my lease sticks, or as you can see here, the stick with velcro that I use for sectional warps. Nice and compact. When I'm done warping, it's easy to slip the cords off and put them away.
And here's another of my favorite "found" tools. One of our dearest friends is a Frenchman named Alain - whenever he comes to visit, he brings the most wonderful champagne, and it comes with these ribbons on the bottles. I've got a drawer full of them, and they are SO handy!

One of the great hints I learned from Kati Meek was to lay the reed horizontal so it's easy to sley with an autodenter. Previously, I've used sticks across the front and back beams, with the reed laying on the sticks. This loom has a hanging beater, and I wondered if I could just secure the reed to the bottom edge of that, using the champagne bands. Voila! It worked! I used some long purple rubber bands to bring the beater forward to a vertical position. Since you can remove the breast beam on this loom, I expect sleying to be very fast and very easy.

I love found tools. I love finding ways with each new warp to make things faster and easier. I love rubber bands. Actually, I love plastibands - rubber bands get brittle too fast here with the frequent Santa Anas that dry things out so much. I like boxes and bags and finding the perfect container for things. I love the iPod shuffle I recently got, and listening to podcasts while I work at the loom or walk the dog. Life is good.

In the Meantime

2009-04-17T13:03:00.000-07:00

I'm halfway through beaming a new warp on the David loom. I decided I like the teapot/teacup design from the taquete experiments the most, so I'm going to weave some tea towels.

In the meantime, I've been doing a bit of knitting. At the Unity Center a few weeks ago, they announced that a class of school kids was doing a recycling project. They were taking plastic grocery sacks and making "plarn" - aka plastic yarn, and their plan is to make at least 12 shopping bags to give to the school board members on Earth Day. They learned to crochet, but it was going slowly so they asked for help. I volunteered to make a bag.

When I got the plarn, the instructions said to use a size N crochet hook. The largest I have is a K, and using that seemed really hard on my hands. So.... I got out my size 15 knitting needles and decided to knit a bag instead. Much easier!!! I made a simple rectangle with 5 or 6 rows of garter stitch, a large rectangle of stockinette, about 10 rows of garter stitch for the bottom of the bag, another rectangle of stockinette, and then finishing with another 5 or 6 rows of garter for the top of the bag. I kept 2 stitches of garter on either side of the stockinette rectangles to keep it from curling too much. When the knitting was finished, I used a crochet hook to make the sides of the bag and handle. The sides are filet crochet and the handle is double crochet.

I'm glad I only volunteered to make one. It was fun, but weird.

I've also got another knitting project in the works - my mother loves turquoise and I bought some gorgeous turquoise alpaca yarn on ebay a while back. I'm knitting her a scarf since she frequently feels chilled. I saw a V shaped scarf in a library book, but modified it a bit. This is a simple pattern. For the first "leg" of the V, you alternate two rows. In row one, you knit front and back in the first stitch, then alternate purl 2, knit 2, and at the end of the row, when you have 3 stitches left, you knit 1 and then knit 2 together. Row two, coming back, you simply alternate purl 2 and knit 2. When you're ready to turn the corner of the V, you simply change Row one of the pattern. You K2tog at the beginning, and knit front and back in the last stitch. You can see from this photo that I've just recently turned the corner. I like the subtle rib that seems to make this warmer than you'd expect from a lightweight scarf.

Hopefully, I'll have tea towel progress to report soon, plus news on the big loom, which has been idle for too long.

Where There's a Will....

2009-04-11T15:02:00.001-07:00

Here's yet another way to do a charted grid design.

Yep, it's a spreadsheet. Select columns A-K and set the column width to 2. If you want, put the pattern shafts in the row below the design. Now select a fill color, then select a cell or group of cells and click on Fill to put that color in those cells.

The advantage to using a spreadsheet is that you can add notes and a title if you want. It's a little more cumbersome to fill the squares with color, but the main disadvantage is that you can't import it into other graphics programs or weaving software. But if you're making a chart you are going to use manually, it works fine.

Note that you can do something identical by creating a table in Windows and setting the column sizes so you get small squares, then selecting cells and clicking on Fill. Like I said ..... where there's a will.... :-)

Another Way to Do Design Grids

2009-04-11T12:41:00.000-07:00

Sue mentioned that she has Fiberworks PCW Bronze, and apparently that doesn't have the sketchpad feature. So.... here's another option to try, if you've got Photoshop. (You can probably do this with Elements, too.)

Create a new file and set it's size to 11 pixels wide and 16 pixels high (or whatever dimensions you think you will need for your design.) Turn on a Grid that is set for lines between every pixel. Now increase the magnification to the max (1600%.) Now you can play with the pixels in the grid to your heart's content.

Note the magnification level in the bottom left corner - highlighting it and changing the value to 1600 is the fastest way to zoom all the way in.

Creating Taquete Designs

2009-04-08T17:28:00.001-07:00

Here's how I do the charted designs for taquete. I use Fiberworks PCW, which has a wonderful little feature. You can create something called a sketchpad, which gets saved as a bitmap file. You can set the size of the grid and then enlarge it so it's easy to select the squares. For this, the grid is 11 squares wide, and the height I set depends on the design I'm creating. If you think of each column in the grid as representing a block, you could label the column with the number of the pattern shaft for that column -
3 4 5 6 7 8 7 6 5 4 3
but after you do a design or two, you don't need the label.

This is assuming that you have used a summer and winter threading with the blocks in point order. The shell design shown here is completely symmetrical so it can be woven with no pickup. The teapot and teacup both require a small amount of pickup for the handle of the cup and for the spout and handle of the teapot.

In both of these cases, I simply have a two color design - one color (white) for the background and one color for the pattern. You can also make a design with multiple colors - though if you get more than three or four, you're going to be juggling shuttles quite a bit!

If you want distinct designs that don't merge (assuming you have repeats of the blocks in point order), then create your design so the right and left columns are part of the background.

This is addictive!!!

More Taquete Experimenting

2009-04-07T15:46:00.000-07:00

Today I cut off the taquete warp from the David loom. I've secured ends and the results are now in the washing machine, but before I tossed them in there, I took a few pictures.

First, here are the sheep - nice and fat after resleying the warp.

Then I began experimenting, beginning with Lillian Whipple's butterfly design from her workshop.

Remember my last post, where Sara was surprised at my using a knitted pillow top and sewing it to a commercial pillow? Well, I decided I wanted to focus on weaving taquete design strips on this warp, rather than whole towels, to make the most of the warp that remained. So... I started just weaving strips of designs. The plan is to hem them, and then sew them to - you guessed it - some commercial towels.

I wanted to create some of my own designs. I've got lots of shells and images of shells around my house. For taquete on 8 shafts, you can only have a 6 block design, so it was a bit challenging to do a design that looked like a shell, but I'm happy with the result.

Since a gold key is a special symbol for me, I tried those, using golden yellow linen for the pattern weft. As you can see, I started using off white for the background, but it's hard to see the keys (although the linen makes them pop out texturally, if not visually) so I tried again with dark blue for the background. I liked that better.

Moving along, I made a little house design, and then had the most fun creating a design for teapots and teacups. (That's my symbol for my sister, who I dearly wish lived closer so we could get together for tea.)

These look a little funky - I suspect they might look a little better after finishing. We'll see. Still, I had a wonderful time playing with making these designs. Makes me want to do more, too, although I may try this on the Megado next time so I can avoid the pickup process that slowed things down so much. In fact, I tried doing a celtic braid design, but that required SO much pickup that I finally gave up on it. I have patience, but I also do have my limits.

Happy Birthday Debbie!!!

2009-03-25T16:29:00.000-07:00

One of my absolute dearest friends, Debbie, lives in Newport News,Virginia. She and her husband bought property in the mountains of east Virginia, and the two of them built the most incredible cabin there. This is a special, magical place that we refer to as Cloud 9.

A variety of critters visit Cloud 9 - deer, wild turkeys, and even bears. I suspect that Bear is a totem animal for Debbie. Friday is her birthday, and I got this crazy idea to make a pillow for her cabin, using the bear paw quilting pattern, but instead of piecing fabric, to knit squares. Here's the result...

The squares were knit on the diagonal, which surprisingly gives them a woven look. The yarn is Lamb's Pride Bulky which is 85% wool and 15% mohair, singles. I knitted 4 large brown squares, 4 small white squares, and 16 small squares that are half white and half brown. (Actually, I ran out of brown, so for a "design element", one of them is half white and half green.) I had lots of ends to sew in, and when I started to sew them together, discovered the small squares were a little too big. So.... I sewed those together with a seam, and then just butted the large square next to the resulting L to stitch those parts together. It gave the bear claw some dimension - isn't it lovely when a solution to a mistake gives you a bonus effect? Last, but not least, I crocheted a join between each quarter square, and then between halves, and then around the edges. I partially felted the result to make it softer and to shrink it slightly, and low and behold, it ended up the perfect size to stitch to a commercial 18" x 18" pillow (brown chenille.)

I just got word today that the package had arrived, and she really likes it. :-D I am so happy about that! And.... she's going to take it to Cloud 9, which is perfect.

Happy Birthday, Debbie!!!

What I Love About My Kindle 2

2009-03-24T15:27:00.001-07:00

I haven't had my Kindle 2 for long, but I am already totally in love with it. I have an ancient PDA I used to read books on, and that was kinda cool, but there were lots of awkward things about eBooks back then. This gizmo solves the biggest problems.

It used to be quite a maze to navigate to find and then download the books you wanted on the pda, and it seemed every book had a different mechanism and copy protection technique. With this, getting books on to the Kindle couldn't be any easier! It's got a wifi connection called WhisperNet. You can search through the Kindle store from the device itself, and when you select a book to purchase, it downloads and is ready for reading almost immediately. You can also purchase books from the Amazon web site on your computer, and next time you turn on the Kindle - voila, the book will automatically download and appear.
The eInk technology is very easy on your eyes - page changes are quick. In almost no time, you aren't even aware that you are reading on a gizmo rather than from a regular book.
Placement of the next and prev page buttons makes them very easy to use.
One of my favorite features is the ability to change the size of the text of the book you are reading. This means that if it's late or I'm tired, I can magically turn my book into a large print edition. If not, I can make the text smaller and see more on the screen at a time. (I suspect that aging eyesight is cruelest for speed readers - whose reading speed depends on scanning techniques that benefit from a LOT of text in one glance.)
The thing I love the most is the search ability. One of my volunteer tasks is finding inspirational readings for a Unity Church each week, and I often search texts from most of the major religions, including the words of Jesus, A Course in Miracles, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, The Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu, The Dhammapada of Buddha ..... With all of these on my kindle, I can simply search for terms related to the topic at hand, get a list of all of the hits in the items on my kindle, and then navigating to the hits is super simple.
It is cool to be able to highlight a passage and make notes on a page, all without defacing a book (something I still struggle with.) Best of all, if I come across a word I'm not familiar with, I can instantly look it up in the dictionary included. How cool is that?!

Not everything is perfect, of course. One of the first thing that some of us have wondered about is backlighting - if you're in a low light situation, wouldn't it be nice to turn on a screen backlight for better contrast? Well, unfortunately, with that wonderful eInk technology, that's not possible. If you want to read in bed with the lights off, you're going to need a regular book light.

It's nice having the little keyboard on there for taking notes, though I have trouble seeing the gray letters on the tiny keys. It's a standard querty keyboard though, so once your thumbs and noggin get used to it, it's pretty simple to use.

If I could make any changes, they would be:

Include a protective cover.
Put a non-slip backing on it so make it easier to hold.
Maybe include some sort of leash - that clips into the side slots and has a handle that goes around your wrist. (Then you don't have to worry about dozing off and dropping the sucker. If you don't buy the extended warranty plan, it can cost big bucks to replace a broken screen. This is well made, but definitely couldn't be called rugged.)
Most of all, there is no way to pass on your books to anyone else. These are priced pretty well - most commercial new books are ~ $10. And Amazon keeps an archive of all the books you purchase, so you can delete them from the Kindle, and redownload them from the archive at no charge. However, what I'd like to be able to do is to delete a book I've read from my Kindle, then transfer the ownership of that book to someone else's Kindle. Amazon could charge a small fee for the transfer, and everyone would benefit.
There are no folders - all of your books go in one big list. You can sort the list alphabetically by title, author, or by most recently downloaded, but still, I'd like to be able to put my books in folders.
It's all black and white, which is fine for reading fiction, but there are lots of books with pictures and diagrams where color really enhances the information.
After seeing my son's iPhone, it would be cool to have a touch screen interface rather than the little square navigation button. I also found it easier to use graffiti on the PDA to make notes, rather than using the keyboard on the Kindle, but maybe that's just because I haven't used it much yet.

I don't travel often, but I'm looking forward to the next trip - when I can load up the kindle with a bunch of books, with no added weight to my carry-on. Very cool!

Various and Sundry

2009-03-23T20:30:00.000-07:00

First of all, many thanks to my new blogging buddy, Lynnette for this:

How cool is that - especially with me being pretty new to this blogging stuff and all.

Accepting this award means following some rules:
1. Copy the Kreativ Blogger award to your blog
2. Put a link to the person from whom you received the award
3. Nominate 8 other blogs and
4. Link to them
5. Then leave a message on the blogs you have nominated

And here's the tricky part - who to pass it on to. There are several blogs that I read religiously, and several that I read regularly. And before I tag them, I suppose I should check to make sure they haven't already received this one. (Mathematically speaking, it might be possible to tag all of the weaving blogs out there in just a few passes.)

These are my first three choices...
Sara at Woven Thoughts
Alice at Weaverly
Sue at Life Looms Large

Second, I've been working on a knitting project, that finally got finished and sent out today to the intended recipient. When she's gotten it, I'll post it here to share my latest meander.

Last, but not least, tomorrow I'll do a post on all the things I love about my Kindle 2.

Hummingbird Movie

2009-03-17T15:41:00.000-07:00

My recent job interviews were with a company that makes educational software. One of their products is a very cool program called Frames, that lets you create your own movies. I didn't get the job, but since I have a few days left on the eval version of the program, I thought I'd create a movie with the hummingbird pictures.

Gone

2009-03-15T09:28:00.000-07:00

This is a picture from yesterday - first baby's excursion, and resting on the edge of a window.

When I came downstairs this morning, I checked the nest. The second baby was still there. I talked to it for a minute, then came inside to make coffee. When Eldy came downstairs later, he checked - baby was gone! I walked outside, enjoyed watching her crazy flights from the liquidamber tree in the front yard. Here's the empty nest.

They made it, and I'm so happy about that. Now we'll trim the dead twigs and leaves out of the tree and check the watering system, but we'll leave the nest in place - looking forward to next time.

And Then They Flew!!!

2009-03-14T17:06:00.000-07:00

Well, at least one of them just flew from the nest!!! Here are the two of them, pre-flight, they obviously don't fit in the nest anymore, and had their wings out.

My son Matt was taking pictures, when one of them humbuzzed right by!

He landed in a branch, and sat there for a long time. He was bobbing and flexing, as if to say "Whoa, Dude!!!" (This is southern California, after all.)
It was hysterical to sit and watch him. He sat for a long while, then his mom called to him, and he took off for a brief, rather frantic and spastic flight, before returning to the branch.

Meanwhile, back in the nest, his sister sat enjoying the warm sun, wondering where that cool breeze had come from.This is SO exciting, though of course, bittersweet, too. Not sure if they are going to take off for good now. We'll know when it's history, as my husband often says.

Incremental Progress

2009-03-12T15:40:00.000-07:00

First.... here's the braid I made yesterday from my thrums. I like it, though I probably should learn how to use the white balance on my little camera. I still need to secure the ends before I stitch it onto the kindle bag, and also figure out exactly where I want to attach it.

Speaking of progress - look how HUGE the babies are. We expect them to fly away any day now, but it's still so thrilling to open the front door and see them there.

Project Mileage

2009-03-11T14:08:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I was in charge of setting up the guild loom in our booth at the San Diego County Fair. It was so long ago that at that time, it was still called The Del Mar Fair. I was enamored of fibonacci stripes at the time, and using them to blend from one color to another, so I warped up the loom with some 10/2 mercerized cotton - blending from blue to green. Here's a shot of the fabric.
Now, these threads did not start out as blue and green. Being thrifty, I went through the guild cabinets and found some cones of 10/2 - in bubblegum pink and bright lime green. I'm not particularly fond of either color, so I overdyed both of them with blue, and voila - ended up with some nice oceanic colors that I think blend very well. There's a little variation in the dyeing, and I actually liked that effect, too.

After the fair was over, I wove off the rest of the warp, doing hemstitching on either end, plus some weft stripes of twill for accent. This was sett at 24 epi - a good sett for plain weave, but what I ended up with is something rather stiff for a scarf. It's never been worn - just sat in a box with all of the other marinating fabrics.

Recently, though, I mistakenly purchased a Kindle 2. Well, I did mean to purchase it, but I pre-ordered it, thinking they would come out in the summertime, thinking I would be gainfully employed by that time. Instead, they came out in February, and I didn't get the job I was interviewing for. However, I LOVE the Kindle. I decided to make a slipcover for it, and hmmmm, looking through the box of fabrics, this popped out. After relearning how to use my sewing machine, this is what I came up with.

Then I decided it would be cool to make a kumihimo handle to attach. Hmmmm..... do I still have the thrums? I looked in the thrum box, and YES, I do!

I carefully pulled off 8 threads for each of the 8 tama - 4 tama with green and 4 with blue. I'll post again when the handle is braided.So this is definitely a project I'm getting a lot of mileage out of. Your mileage may vary...

So BIG!

2009-03-09T13:50:00.001-07:00

Look how big the baby hummingbirds are!!!! You can see their feathers developing, and now their beaks always show. I suspect they will be fledging very very soon. A good friend said to keep watching - at some point the mama bird will likely sit a ways away and call to them. I'm looking forward to seeing them learning to fly, even if it means they'll be going away.

Another friend suggested leaving the nest in place - saying sometimes they will return next year to the same nest, if it is still there.

Babies Overflowing

2009-03-06T14:50:00.001-08:00

The babies now fill the nest to overflowing. And here's a peek at them from the side of the nest without the mirror - so you can see their little heads and beaks popping up over the top.

Anybody remember the chubby puppy in 101 Dalmations. "I'm hungry, Mother, I'm hungry!"

Gratitude Poem

2009-03-06T09:41:00.000-08:00

I'm not normally a poet, but last night, at the last session of my class with Jan Phillips, she read us a poem called Gratitude, by Mary Oliver. Then we were to answer the questions in the poem ourselves. She said you should share what you write, so.... here's my poem.

Gratitude
(after Mary Oliver)
by Deanna Johnson

What did you notice?

The grace of cool fresh air after the dry despair of Santa Anas.

What did you hear?

A white hum, not noise, of thousands of cars with some place urgent to go,
sounding like the pound of waves on sand.

What did you admire?

The painted houses, colors blending from one to another,
courageously hiding the stark faces of garage doors.

What astonished you?

The simplicity, the amazing analogy of spectrums of color and sound.

What would you like to see again?

The face of my sister, with echoes of family gestures and laughter and care.

What was most tender?

Touching baby hummingbirds, still warm,
not abandoned after all, a sweet relief.

What was most wonderful?

The beating of the weft, flashes of color, coalescing into fabric,
felt in bones and heart.

What did you think was happening?

I opened each love letter of life, comforted.

Growing Babies

2009-03-02T13:07:00.000-08:00

After the delight of finding the baby hummingbirds, our whole family became quite protective of them. We had a bit of drama on Friday, though.

A neighbor came to borrow something, and while we stood talking with the door opened, the hummingbird got in the house. She kept zooming around the high ceilings, trying to find her way back out. We tried our best to help her - noticing she kept flying toward areas of reflected light, we turned out most of the lights in the house except those in the foyer by the front door. No luck. Then she headed upstairs. We closed all of the doors off the hallway up there, but still couldn't get her to head back toward the door. Finally, I held up a goalie lacrosse net. She sat on it, and as hummers usually do when they think they are caught, she played dead. I took the net downstairs and outside, set in on the ledge near the front door, and off she went.

All's well and good, right? Well, it got pretty cold that night, and every time I looked out there, no mom on the nest. I was really worried about those babies, almost to the point of despair. (It seems silly in retrospect.) I went to an all-day HeartMath class on Saturday, and while I was gone, my son Matthew called Hummingbird Rescue to ask for their advice. They actually told him to touch the babies to be sure they were alive and warm (they were.) I never knew you could touch them - some species of birds will abandon babies that have been touched my humans, but apparently not hummingbirds. They said as the babies get bigger, the mom is gone more and more away from the nest, getting food. We were worried that she might have freaked out about her indoor excursion and abandoned the nest, but nope, she didn't. My husband Eldy bought another hummingbird feeder to hang by the front of the house. Our regular one is in the backyard.

Here's evidence that the babies are growing. The two of them about fill the nest now!

Back to Weaving Taquete

2009-02-27T14:51:00.000-08:00

I resleyed from 20 epi to 15 epi. I was a little apprehensive about it, since I warped sectionally, and this makes the warp wider in the reed than on the beam - something I never ever do. So far, though, so good. Now my little sheep are nice and plump. There's also one other difference - I only used the black pattern weft in areas where there were black squares on the row. Interesting to compare this to the elongated sheep here.

More Hummingbird Photos

2009-02-25T17:13:00.000-08:00

I found out why I couldn't see little eggs in the nest any longer - there are little babies! I didn't want to touch the branch, so I held up a mirror. Unfortunately, I found it almost impossible to get a non-blurry picture with my little camera and no tripod.

It didn't take long before the mom tried to chase me away. This photo is blurred, too, but mostly from her wing movement. You can see that flash of bluegreen that wasn't visible in the photo of her sitting on her nest. Isn't this cool?!

I promise to do a weaving non-hummingbird post soon - I've resleyed on the David loom and will give the taquete images another go with a looser sett.

Got Her!

2009-02-24T16:29:00.001-08:00

There are times when I really wish I had a fancy camera, or at least a magnifier attached to my little Canon Powershot S330 so I could see the icons. Anyway, I slowly opened the front door, stood there quietly, and was able to capture this shot of the hummingbird sitting on the nest. Isn't that cool?! It would be even cooler if the image was in focus, but I must have disabled the autofocus when I was hitting buttons to make sure the flash wouldn't go off. Sigh... naturally, she took off soon after this shot was taken. I'll try again soon, but I'm trying to be very careful not to disturb her or the nest.

Magical Things

2009-02-20T10:17:00.001-08:00

First, a not so good photo of something truly magical. We have a potted tree on our front porch, and a hummingbird has made three little nests on one branch. You can see two of them here, and the middle nest has several little eggs in it. Isn't this cool! I'd love to remove the dead leaves and twigs, but I don't want to disturb the nest or the parents. We discovered this recently when we noticed that everytime we walked out our front door, we could hear the hummbuzz and noticed the hummingbird was strafing us - dive bombing close by in an obvious attempt to get us to move on and get away. I'm wondering how long it will be till there are little baby hummingbirds?

I've been interviewing for a job the last week or so, and after two face to face interviews, I'm sitting with my fingers crossed waiting. It's a fantastic company, great people and fascinating work and I really really hope I get the job. While waiting, I spent some time yesterday afternoon listening to the latest Weavecast, hemming my taquete towel experiments. Mental note - use sewing thread for the hems even if they are experiments. Surprisingly, I like the first one best - the thinner pattern weft - it has a sort of lacey look. I like the body of the second one - the plain taquete with 3/2 pattern weft in the same color as the warp. I may do that for the next one.

In the meantime, I'm resleying to 15 epi because..... my sheep design came out somewhat elongated. I used 3/2 cotton for the background color, black chenille for the faces and feet (that should have been thicker, IMHO) and handspun for the bodies. Here are my quasimodo sheep...

In addition, I have a little bit of warp left on the Megado. It's a 32 shaft straight draw threading, so I'm going to make a lift plan that will give me taquete. That warp is very loosely sett - only 12 epi - so it will be interesting to compare 12 vs the new 15 sett on the David vs the previous 20 epi sett I was using.

No end of fun! And delighting in little magical things.... if I can capture a picture with the hummingbird sitting in the nest, I'll post that. Amazing that they sit still long enough to sit in a nest, but they do.

All's Right With the World

2009-02-16T10:53:00.000-08:00

The thing I like most about organizing is that "All's Right with the World" feeling that you get, for a little while, anyway. The thing I like next most is that doing a little organizing makes you want to do even more.

A couple of years ago, a good friend and neighbor gave me some lovely vases as a birthday gift. They are blue ceramic - one with the word "harmony", one with "serenity". I love them, but unfortunately discovered that they don't hold water very well - not sure if they leaked or sweated, but I put them on the shelf to use as bookends, until the day when I would remember to find and buy some plastic inserts.

That day didn't come, but.... as part of my organizing, I decided they would be a perfect place to put my collection of bamboo knitting needles. Voila!!!

Before I put them in their new spot, I used a permanent marker to mark the sizes on the ends. That way I won't have to find my magnifying glass to check the tiny print on the sides of the needles with the sizes. I really like these needles, though they are cheapies. I bought them on ebay from a seller in Hong Kong - got a full set with all sizes for ~ $20 including shipping. I liked the first set I got so much that I ordered another in the shorter size.

An Organized Stash

2009-02-11T14:16:00.000-08:00

I have limited space in the house for my fiber stash, and last year purchased a small storage shed to put in the backyard. I shoved boxes of stuff in there, but found the result unsatisfying for a variety of reasons - first, it didn't look very nice, and second, I found some spiders in there - I figure if spiders can find their way inside, so can some other bugs. I contemplated renting a storage unit, but those are expensive here in San Diego. It dawned on me that if I transferred stuff to clear plastic storage bins, my stash might be safe in the storage shed.

So... I purchased a bunch of bins at Target on Sunday. Unfortunately, I eyeballed the lids rather than trying them, and... you guessed it ... I had the wrong lids. We had torrential downpours on Monday, so yesterday I went and exchanged the lids for the correct ones.

I printed labels for each bin and put them in page protectors and tucked them in the sides of the bins. Since we're expecting more rain tomorrow, I decided today was the day to clear out the junk stored in the shed, and move my bins in. I'm exhausted, but got it done! Here you can see stacks of bins with spinning fibers and weaving yarns.

And here you can see the stack of bins with knitting yarns.

This means that next time I'm looking for a specific item from my stash, I should be able to find it fairly quickly, and it should be pretty safe in the shed. Luckily, I don't have a lot of wool, but I do plan to check from time to time and see if my scheme is working, and if not, move the wool out.

It's amazing how much energy getting organized frees up!

Taquete Texture

2009-02-07T13:39:00.000-08:00

I'm still on a roll with this taquete warp, and learning a lot.

For the second towel (which I just finished weaving), I decided for the body of the towel to stick with taquete rather than summer and winter. the weft is 3/2 cotton, and I just wove a 4 pick sequence of
1 + 3->8 down
1
2 + 3->8 down
2

On a regular jack loom, this is equivalent to
2 up
2 + 3->8 up
1 up
1 + 3->8 up

Very easy to treadle, and so very comfortable to weave, all with the same weft, and I like the fabric texture that resulted.

Why the David Loom is Great for Taquete

2009-02-05T21:42:00.000-08:00

First, to describe the Louet David loom - mine has 8 shafts and 10 treadles, and it is a reverse jack loom. What's a reverse jack? Well, with a regular jack loom, all your threads are at one level, you press a treadle that lifts some shafts. With the David loom, there are springs that pull all of your warp threads up. Instead of tyeing the treadles to LIFT some shafts, you tie the treadles on the David to pull shafts DOWN. This gives an excellent shed, since some threads are pulled up and some down, as you have with a countermarche loom. When not weaving, a post fits through cams on all of the shafts, lowering the pulled up threads so they don't have unnecessary tension when the warp is at rest.

As for taqueté - it's basically summer and winter with no tabbies. For each row of your pattern, you lift 1 and all of the pattern shafts that don't have color A in your design, and then throw a pick of color A. With 1 still lifted, you lift all of the pattern shafts that don't have color B and throw a pick of color B. If you've got three colors, well, you get the pattern. Then you repeat with shaft 2 and the pattern shafts. So if you have three colors, each row in your design will be woven with 6 picks.

Since the David loom is pulling shafts down, it's even easier. I've got the treadles tied up so the left four treadles each have one shaft tied to them, 1 2 3 and 4 in order. The right four treadles have 5, 6, 7 and 8 tied to them, in order. The middle two treadles are tied up for tabby - the left one is tied to 1 and 2, and the right is tied to 3 through 8.

Say the first row of my design has Color A for shafts 3 and 4. Now, I can press the treadles for 3 and 4, insert a pickup stick, then treadle 2 (so shaft 1 stays up) and then throw a pick of Color A. If my feet are long enough, I can actually press treadles 2, 3 and 4 at the same time and throw the pick, and I don't need the pickup stick. So the sequence becomes

2 + pattern shafts for color A, throw the A shuttle (= lift 1 and shafts not for A)
2 + pattern shafts for color B, throw the B shuttle
2 + pattern shafts for color C, throw the C shuttle
1 + pattern shafts for color A, throw the A shuttle
1 + pattern shafts for color B, throw the B shuttle
1 + pattern shafts for color C, throw the C shuttle

And you just repeat that sequence for each row. If one of the colors doesn't appear on a row of the design, you throw a pick of that color with just 1 or 2, whichever step you are on. If a color appears in all of the blocks, you can use the second tabby treadle plus 1 or 2. To me, it's much easier to think of treadling for the shafts where you want pattern to appear ("I have pattern on shafts 3 and 4, so I'll treadle 3 and 4), rather than having to do a mental translation "okay, I have pattern on shafts 3 and 4, so I need to treadle shafts 5 through 8."

Taquete Second Try

2009-02-04T13:46:00.001-08:00

So why am I playing with taqueté?

I first learned this weave structure in a workshop given by Lillian Whipple, sponsored by San Diego Creative Weavers Guild, back in the 90's. It was a fun workshop, and I remember really enjoying it and playing quite a bit with making bitmap designs to weave. I wove the shuttle and spindle below after the workshop, using pickup for the spindle since the design wasn't symmetrical, but have never woven with this structure since.

Well, Lillian was back in San Diego in January, but unfortunately, I was not able to take her workshop. It got me thinking of taquete, though, itching to play with some of those old designs I had made. I didn't feel up for a sewing thread warp, though, and wondered what it would be like using a heavier warp. Hence the current experiment.

After finishing the first towel, I also decided to try something else I haven't used much. Kati Meek was here last year, and her method of live weight tensioning is magical! Since this particular loom has ratchet and pawls rather than a friction brake, I decided to try the live weight tensioning. Weaving is so much more fun when you don't have to get up to advance the warp.

This picture shows a few things - first, I've got my bobbin winder attached to the back beam. The electric bobbin winder is in the other room near the big loom. It's handy to keep this one here, and space efficient to have it on the back beam since I'm not weaving the full width. Second, I had an odd-shaped rectangular grass basket and was wondering what I could use it for. Since this loom is in the corner of our family room, I decided it was perfect for holding the cones for my weft yarns. Keeps the area looking not quite as chaotic as usual. Last, but not least, the weight pole I've got is too wide for this area, so rather than using it and risking someone gouging a shin, I just hung the weights on rafter hooks. For this warp, I've got 15 lbs of weight on each side of the loom, and I used the collettes from the weight pole as counterweights. It's working really well.
I decided to try a little fatter pattern weft - so I wound three stick shuttles with some chenille. This does give better coverage, though I think I need something still a little heavier. And... I'm still having fun.

Taqueté Experiment

2009-02-02T16:12:00.000-08:00

First, a Doh! When I warp sectionally, I push each section into velcro mounted on a stick, and use that stick to advance the warp for threading. I hang cords from the built-in raddle and use pegs to make loops for the stick to go through. This works very well, except when I goof as I did here. The warp sections should go over the back beam and then go over the stick from the other direction. Duh... oh well, at least it was fairly easy to fix, and I realized it immediately.

This warp is 8/2 cotton sett at 20 epi. It's a summer and winter threading, blocks in point order with 7 pattern repeats. My plan was to weave the towel in summer and winter, but a design band in taqueté.

It will be interesting to see what this looks like off the loom. In the photo, it looks like I have a treadling error - at the same point in both repeats. I could swear I didn't skip anything - I'm wondering if the pattern wefts that aren't weaving pattern will even out when the tension is released. We'll see. Right now, it doesn't look much like what I was shooting for - I suspect I need fatter pattern wefts.

At least I'm having fun.

New Beginnings

2009-01-20T10:23:00.000-08:00

On this day, one that is incredibly joyful for me and millions of others, I thought it appropriate that I would finish winding on a new warp. This is significant for several reasons...

First, it's the first new warp I've put on my David loom in quite a while. It's a sign that the new way I began the first week of the year will continue. Second, beaming a warp is by its very nature a polarizing event....all the threads are lined up, nice and neat, shoulder to shoulder, so to speak, for a common goal.

This is a snapshot of the main mechanism of the warping wheel. You can see that the thing holding the reed is a little cattywampus - actually, the supporting bracket broke. It's been glued together with gorrilla glue. I'm going to contact AVL and see if I can get a replacement bracket. Second, you can see that this is one of the early warping wheels - it's got pegs on the arms rather than spools.

The picture above shows the winding on of the last section of this warp. My process of winding on is way too fiddly - I hover over it, to make sure no threads stray into adjacent sections. I really need to rig up something with guides to put on the back beam. I've got some little metal things that fit over the U wires, but unfortunately, on this loom, they stick out too far and hit the back beam, so I can't use them. I should try to find some bicycle tubing to try.

And here's the new warp. The little blue spots are pieces of painters tape.

This is not a long warp - only 6 yards. I'm planning to do some experimentation. It's 8/2 cotton at 20 epi. I'm planning to try doing towels with a band in taqueté with the body of the towel in plain summer and winter. I'm not sure if the band will be too heavy - I'll keep you posted.

To Boldly Go...

2009-01-12T15:41:00.001-08:00

Lately, I have been fascinated with an article from WeaveZine - Florida Fantasy, by Jannie Taylor, in the Fall 2008 issue. I've got this incredible loom with a multitude of harnesses, and we all know that one of the unspoken weaving rules is that you MUST use all of your harnesses whenever possible.

The article describes a fabric the author wove with images of palm trees and flamingos in double two-tie unit weave. Did I mention that a few years back I was totally consumed with double two-tie unit weave?! At the time, however, I didn't have all of these shafts - it was after I had to sell my AVL, so I only had an 8 shaft floor loom. This weave structure can really consume lots and lots of treadles, so I shelved the idea.

The good thing about ideas is that they never really go away. They eventually resurface - teased out of retirement by some sort of reminder.

So.... I got out my weaving software - Fiberworks PCW - and started to play. At first, I thought I could create a profile draft, do a block substitution for double 2 tie unit weave, and everything would be hunky dory, but it didn't really turn out that way, so I shifted strategy. I created a threading similar to the article, but using ALL of my shafts (the article is for 24 shafts). To create the design motif in the liftplan, I needed to learn how to use the sketchpad feature of PCW. Very cool, and lots of fun to play with, and neat all the different transforms available. I decided I wanted to weave an image of shuttles and spindles.

In the article, therre is a short paragraph that says "After that, there are several steps before you actually have a weaving draft: space the palms throughout the fabric, add the tabby shots, add the ties to the pattern shots, add the color, etc." This is similar to mathematical proofs that summarize pages of steps with "whence." But... the truth is, those were EXACTLY the steps I needed to take.

I discovered I could invert the pixels on the sketchpad, copy it, and paste it into shafts 3-29 on the liftplan. I edited the liftplan to alternate 1 and 2 and to lift 31 and 32 for the border. When I liked the results, I used the Weft Menu to add tabbies. Then I played with colors until I liked what I saw.

So this will be the next warp on my big loom. I have, by the way, decided to name her. I'm not a big one for naming tools, but it occurred to me that Meghan would be a good name - Meg for Megado and Han for handweaving. A stretch, I know. The bonus is that when I was pregnant many years ago, the name I had picked out if I had a daughter was Meghan. I have two sons, so the name isn't taken in our family.

Like Riding a Bicycle

2009-01-03T09:22:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, my friend Mary and I went down to Liberty Station to see a wonderful quilt exhibit called A Full Deck at the Visions Art Quilt Gallery. Very cool exhibit - each of the quilts is based on a card in a deck of cards, and the range of techniques was awe-inspiring. Some of them were incredibly clever, too! If you're in San Diego, and have some time this weekend, check it out - tomorrow is the last day.

It was also cool to see the place - San Diego Creative Weavers Guild has been talking about possibly getting guild space at Liberty Station. This would be so good, for so many reasons. We currently meet at a rec center, and since our meetings are on Saturdays, we are accompanied by the basketball noise from the gym next door. Since the city has cut back hours at the rec centers, we can no longer stay and have hands on activities in the afternoons after our guild meetings - we have to stack the chairs and be out by 12:30. The main thing this place has had going for it the last few years is a) it's incredibly cheap (and with shrinking guilds, that helps) and b) they have allowed us to use cabinets in one room and a hallway to store our guild library and some guild equipment. That's a feature that's hard to duplicate anywhere else.

So, I've got my fingers crossed. If we have meeting and gallery space at Liberty Station, perhaps the added visibility would also help us to attract new weavers.

But... that wasn't what I planned to post about. This is ...

My poor spinning wheel has been sitting idle for a long time (not as long as the looms, but still) so yesterday, I brought it downstairs, got out a batt and yep - spinning is like riding a bike - even if it has been a while, it seems to come back to you fairly quickly. This was a blend from a Deb Menz workshop I took at the southern California regional conference back in, yikes, 2005. Well aged, and a delight to spin! I've got several more batts - may try to do one with a thicker singles. This bobbin needs to be plied, and I'm not sure if it will muddle the colors too much.

So far, so good, regarding my intention to start the new year with fun and creativity!

New Year Miracle

2009-01-01T16:00:00.000-08:00

Miracle, you say? Isn't she being a bit dramatic.

Well, yes, that is true. But I do have a miracle to report. First, there's the fact that I have posted to my blog TWO DAYS IN A ROW!!! That in itself is jaw-droppingly awesome.

But wait, there's more!

I decided this will be a year with NO resolutions. We don't need no stinkin' resolutions.

But last night I went to a burning bowl ceremony at the Unity Center. This is a powerful exercise, where you meditate, then write on a piece of paper all that you wish to release from the past year. We went single file past grills with blazing fire, and got to toss our lists into the fire. Then we went through another meditation, followed by writing down what we wish to be, do or have in 2009. The final question, to ponder and take home, was "Who must I become to bring this forth?"

I thought about it a lot last night. The result was that I woke up this morning and decided to spend the day doing the things I love that I end up seldom doing due to fear or procrastination.

So, I ...

made a healthy smoothie for breakfast,
flossed my teeth in the morning,
spent some time playing the piano,
and wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles, I spent some time weaving!!!

This is special for several reasons. Mainly, it helps justify the fact that I have this incredible loom that I haven't used enough since I acquired it. In addition, this weaving is evidence of getting over some hurdles that have kept me away from the loom. (Sadly, they don't have to be very high hurdles to stop me cold.) For one, my wonderful loom was donated to our guild when one of our members passed away a couple of years ago. I bought the loom from the guild. But... there were a few things missing. For one thing, it has a fly shuttle mechanism mounted on the loom, but her children decided to keep all of her shuttles for memories of their mother. I could understand that, but they included the fly shuttle that fits this mechanism. I have almost purchased a few fly shuttles at guild sales, but careful measuring revealed that they were too wide to fit my loom's mechanism. A while back, a member of my study group gave me a fly shuttle she was no longer using. But... by then the loom was gathering dust.

Well, today, I got out that fly shuttle, which works fine. I didn't get bogged down when I had to go find a crochet hook that would fit for feeding the thread through the tension gizmo. I actually found the weft yarn I had been using. I started out with only one pirn, wound that, wove, wound it again, wove. Tedious, because the weaving went fast with the fly shuttle, and I was having to stop frequently. So I went and searched on one of the shelves of "stuff", and lo and behold, I discovered a bag of pirns, all of which fit this shuttle. Yeehaaaaa!! So I wound a bunch of pirns and spent some blissful time weaving.

This is the tail end of a warp that was used for something else. I don't think this fabric is particularly successful - the warp is a rather open sett, but I still find this wave pattern rather pleasing, and the weft is a cotton/acrylic baby yarn, so it is very soft. I'm thinking it may end up suitable for a baby blanket - if I've got enough warp left.

Whatever - the important thing is that I'm weaving, and have cleared a hurdle that has held me back for a while. Now I just need to figure out how to get the rotary temple working. I purchased the temple gizmos from the seller's husband, and the brackets for the track were mounted on the loom already, but the track was missing. I purchased it from Fireside at a regional conference, but it came without bolts, so the next step is to track down what size bolts I need to mount the track on the brackets.

For now, I think I'll go spin for a while, and bask in the happy glow.

Happy Start

2008-12-31T12:46:00.000-08:00

This slightly out of focus picture shows my happy start to a new year. Back a few months ago, when money wasn't so tight, I purchased something that had been on my wishlist for a looong time - a set of cases for my collection of Handwoven Magazines. They arrived several months ago, and sat in a box. I was slightly disappointed with my purchase - they came with labels that needed to be applied, unlike the cases I bought several years ago for my Weavers issues - those have the title embossed nicely directly on the case. Still, they are MUCH nicer than the magazine holders I was using before, so it felt really good to finally get the labels applied and the magazines transferred.

My goal for 2009 is to get unstuck, so this seemed like a great start. I love the nice, organized look of my shelf, right behind me as I sit at the loom. (You can just see the corner of the breast beam in the bottom left of the photo.)

For almost the last year, I've been divesting myself of things I seldom use. Not all things, of course, because hope springs eternal. I sold a small triangle loom, my table loom, my previous marudai. I sold a lot of old Weavers Journal and Handweaver and Craftsman issues on ebay. I actually let all of my magazine subscriptions lapse, and even all of my memberships except for my local guild. (I may end up rejoining some organizations, though not right away.)

And yet, I still have two wonderful looms (32 shaft Megado and 8 shaft David), a warping wheel and squirrel swift cage and floor inkle loom, my Lendrum spinning wheel, a charka and a collection of spindles, my takadai and marudai. Now that the first outbreath phase is complete, I want to get better organized and make a concerted effort to actually USE all of my other toys! (That's my biggest problem in life - I THINK about doing a lot of things, but seldom even get things out of my head and onto paper, much less manifest them into something real.)

It will be interesting to see if this phase is followed by an inbreath phase. There was a time when I seemed to continually be acquiring - tools, cones of yarn, anything fibery. I do still get tempted on ebay, but not nearly as much as before. I must say, I'm pretty happy with what I've already got!

Last year, a member of our guild wrote an article on "How to Tell When You Are No Longer a Beginning Weaver", and she asked for suggestions from members. I had a few contributions.

You are no longer a beginner when ...

you know to take a pair of scissors to a workshop even if it isn't on the supply list
you no longer feel giddy at the prospect of being given a free loom or wheel or cone of yarn
when asked your favorite weaving books, Learning to Weave is no longer your only answer.

If asked, I would probably say I'm an intermediate weaver. I learned a lot about weave structure early on in my weaving life, but the amount of actual weaving I've done would probably still put me at the beginning stage. If you average knowledge and experience, I'm square in the middle. The middle is a good place to be - in weaving, in politics, in life. :-)

Happy New Year! I wish you a joyful 2009, filled with lots of playtime with your fibers and toys and friends.

Slacker

2008-12-22T10:43:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted in a while. First, I think I haven't quite gotten the swing of blogging yet. I keep waiting for earthshaking things to happen to blog about. I don't have an earthshaking life (thank heaven) so I need to modify my criteria for blog-worthiness.

To add to my natural slacker tendencies, I've been sick since the day after Thanksgiving. Still not 100%, but at least I finally can function. So.... not having yet done much of anything, I'll share an old photo.

I took this one just before Thanksgiving.

I'm sharing this to prove that in spite of San Diego's reputation for having no seasons, we actually do get a little bit of fall color! I'm thankful for liquidamber trees (aka Sweetgum) because without them, we really wouldn't get much fall color. Ours comes later than most parts of the country, especially in years like this when seemingly non-stop Santa Ana conditions prolong summer way too long. (I don't even mind the warmth so much, but the 10% humidity sucks all of the life out of you.)

Today, it is raining - another rare occurrence for our area. The amazing thing here is that it rains so seldom that when it does, the roads are treaturous, making driving difficult, which people from the northeast consider hilarious. Yes, we are weather wimps here. We make up for it with great courage and fortitude regarding housing and gas prices.

This makes it fairly easy to determine who is native or has been here for a long time, versus who is fairly new to southern California. Newbies complain about the rain. Oldies celebrate. Newbies ooh and aah in the springtime when the hillsides are covered with light green vegetation and lovely sprinkles of yellow mustard flowers. Oldies gripe that all the new vegetation is going to lead to a heightened fire season in the fall. I guess that's true anywhere of anything - we may all see the same thing, but we see with very different eyes.

Merry Christmas, to anyone who sees this. Somehow, it doesn't feel like Christmas yet - perhaps because I've been sick, and so with Christmas 3 days away, I still have not set foot in a store. In a way, that makes the holiday time seem much more gentle, so I suppose it isn't a bad thing. May you find a way to delight in whatever weather you get this week, may you be aware of the grace of good friends, good health, and a steady shower of creative thoughts.

Color Warps, Second Half

2008-11-13T21:52:00.000-08:00

Monk's Belt, 8 shafts (red orange and peacock blue)

Polychrome Summer and Winter, 8 shafts (pastel blue, pink, peach, lime green, teal blue, violet blue)

2 Block Polychrome Double Weave, 8 shafts

Intermittent Twill with Color Progression, 8 shafts (rainbow colors)

Undulating Steep Twill, 8 shafts (2 blues, 2 greens)

Corkscrew Twill, 7 shafts (lime green and forest green)

4 Color Warp, Straight Draw on 8 shafts (pastels - 2 greens, blue, orange-gold)

Color Warps, First Half

2008-11-13T21:31:00.000-08:00

Color and Weave, 4 shafts (brown and gold)

Five Rotating Colors, straight draw threading, 4 shafts (red, blue, yellow, orange green)

Patterned Supplementary Warp Stripes, 4 shafts (ground - orange, supplementary - tangerine, jade, magenta)

Undulating twill, 4 shafts (orange, yellow blue turquoise)

Lace Weave, 4 shafts (blue and purple)

Broken Twill, 8 shafts (dark red, blue, green)

Oh, the Looms!!!

2008-11-13T21:16:00.000-08:00

So much stuff, so many looms, such good energy!

A couple of AVLs...

a lovely Swedish loom.

A rustic barn loom ...

A wall of warping boards ...

... and a wall of spinning wheels ...

and displays of a variety of different weaves ...

And perhaps most fascinating of all - a jacquard loom. It appears to be not yet functional - it will be interesting to see what develops!

So if you are ever in San Diego County - be sure to go to Vista and see the Weavers Barn at the Antique Gas and Steam Engine Museum.

Splendor of Multi-Colored Warps with Betty Vera

2008-11-13T17:52:00.000-08:00

I just had 3 days of bliss and a blast at a workshop with Betty Vera sponsored by Palomar Handweavers. The title was the Splendor of Multicolor Warps, and it was an invitation to move from the world of solid color warp and weft into a whole nother thing. I will confess that near the end, when someone asked if anyone would ever go back to a boring solid color fabric again, I did raise my hand. I truly am more of a structure person than a color person, but I learned so much in this workshop, and hope to put that information to good use, soon!

The workshop was held in the Weavers Barn at the Antique Gas and Steam Engine Museum in Vista.
This place is what I want my heaven to look like - it's chock full of the most amazing variety of looms - from incredibly simple to intensely complex, from tiny to gigantic, from ancient to modern. Walls are lined with tools and bins of yarn.

This was the view from the workshop end of the barn...

... and this was the view from the other end.

We had a luscious stash of an amazing spectrum of weft options.

I'll post pictures of some of the looms in the barn, as well as the warps and samples from the workshop, in my next post.

This is the definition of fun!

Cardweaving Loom (Of Sorts)

2008-10-04T11:16:00.000-07:00

Okay, to answer Ruth's questions about the cardweaving warps shown in the previous post, here are a few photos and some explanation.

This is the "band end" of the loom. It consists of a board of wood with tensioning blocks (from Linda Hendrickson) clamped on each end of the board with grip clamps. (Originally, I used one clamp on each end, and the other clamp was intended for clamping the whole thing to a table. However, I discovered that using two clamps kept the tensioning block from torquing, so I used it as shown. You can also see that the weaving is currently clamped to the post of the tensioning block with a binder clip. I would prefer to use a clamp - wrap the band around the post and clamp it - but... I couldn't find a clamp quickly, and was trying to get prepared for the demo, so I just used the binder clip. One nice thing about that - when you beat in the weft, sort of grinding to get a nice tight beat, you can push down on the "handles" of the binder clip to increase the tension.

This photo is looking toward the other end of the loom. You can see the cards hanging in the warp, then the warp spreader, then groups of warp threads hitched to the opposite post. The warp spreader is also from Linda Hendrickson - it's the original style she used to sell. I've used a rubber band to hold the metal post in place. I prefer not to have the warp spreader hang on the warp, so I put a block of wood under it, and used another larger rubber band to fasten that to the base board. The graphic you can see there is an enlarged image from one of Linda's articles - showing the position of the A-B line for each pick in double-faced tabletweaving.

This last photo shows the other end of the "loom." Again, grip clamps attach the tensioning block to the end of the board. Groups of warp threads are tied to the post of the block. I struggled to find a good knot for this - I wanted to find a knot that would hold firm, but also be easily adjustable to let out more warp. I found the hitch shown here. It's not quite what I want, but was okay for the moment. It didn't hold quite tight enough, so I then took each half of the warp and wrapped it around the grip clamp. (If I can find the web sit with the diagram of this hitch, I'll post that later.)

Carded

2008-09-26T19:51:00.000-07:00

No, not that kind of carded. (My hair went white in my 20's, so I haven't been carded in that way since I was a teenager.) No, the kind of card I'm referring to is the kind you use to weave narrow bands....

Today was the September meeting of a study group in my weavers guild that I'm a member of - a group called Warped Explorers. In the past, we've had presentations on an incredible variety of topics. Recently, though, we've had fewer programs - and more of a social component to our meetings. It's been wonderful to have that time to connect, to hear about the various pursuits, to see some of the results, but a few were concerned that the group was turning into *only* a social get-together.

So.... I thought about that a while, realized I'm one of the people who hasn't had much to share other than enthusiasm for a while. One member had mentioned a few months ago that she would be interested in hearing a program on tabletweaving. That's something I've done a bit of, and have some interest in, so... maybe Gay, the hostess of this month's meeting, and I could do a program on cardweaving. (I actually prefer the term cardweaving to tabletweaving, which is the more common name for this technique on the "other side of the pond." When I think of tablets, I picture big tablets of yellow paper. :-/ So I usually call it cardweaving, although I acknowledge that you can pee in the ocean, but you cannot change the tide.)

Anyway, we gave a simple program. I made some giant cards, threaded with rug wool - a great tool for showing folks what happens with this method of weaving.

When I first got interested in this, I got excited, thinking it was a way you could essentially do four shaft weaving without a loom. But, of course, what I quickly learned, was that this isn't like regular weaving - it's got a very important difference - the warp threads going through the holes in each card twine around the weft threads. With these giant cards, it's really easy to see what's happening with each subsequent weft pick. The bottom card in this picture shows the typical threading for double-faced cardweaving - 1 color in 2 adjacent holes, and another color in the other 2 holes. One color is used for background, the other for foreground, and weaving 2 picks turning the card forward, then 2 picks back, keeps one color on top and the other on the bottom of the band. The upper card is actually a stack of 2 cards, with a different color in each hole - typical of threaded in designs. I used a fat weft thread to show what happens with 4 turns forward, 4 back. In retrospect, I think it would be easier to see by using a rigid weft like chopsticks or something.

Anyway, after the intro, we had several warps for folks to see and try - one with 2 cards for a very narrow band I learned from Ruth MacGregor (who said it was found by Shirley Berlin in Lapland.) One warp was setup for double-faced cardweaving......

and the one in back Gay setup for showing textural effects in tabletweaving.

We had a small turnout, but the best result was that I've renewed my interest in cardweaving.

Fun stuff! So yes, I'd say I've been carded.

Chickens and Eggs

2008-08-12T20:47:00.001-07:00

I've been pondering again - wondering if I tend to not post very often because I mostly feel like I'm just talking to myself, or if perhaps there are few readers because I tend not to post often. I suppose both are true.

No major fiber projects to report. I started a new job at the beginning of July, and working full-time has been both a blessing and a shock. I wasn't sure I could go back to programming, and am surprised to find that the dusted off brain cells still function, and I'm actually enjoying myself! Interesting.

Tomorrow, though, I'm off into the wild blue yonder again. I'm flying to Huntsville, AL where my mother lives (and where I grew up.) My sister will meet me there, and the three of us will drive to Wisconsin to visit Mom's relatives. I haven't been to Wisconsin for almost 20 years - I'm really looking forward to seeing my aunts and uncles and cousins and their kids.

I've packed plenty of toys - a new knitting project (lovely turquoise alpaca for a diagonal V-shaped scarf,) and some embroidery floss and the new lucet that I purchased at the Tampa Convergence but have not yet played with. I'm also taking my new laptop, but that is mostly so I will be able to get some work done while I'm away. And, of course, I've got several books I'm taking. I never mind long waits in the waiting areas - it's prime reading time - nothing else to compete for your attention.

When I get back, I've got big plans. (Famous last words - how often have I postponed projects until after some big event?!) Anyway, here's what I plan to do - I'm going to box up all the STUFF that is piled in the corner of my loom area. It forms a very effective barrier that keeps me from ever approaching my loom, and that needs to change. So.... I'm going to box up all that crap, maybe even temporarily rent a storage unit so I can move the stuff out and have a clear space to sort through it all, figure out what to organize, what to release. Then I intend to weave off the warp on the Megado, and finally get a new warp on the David loom. I've got a set of weights I purchased from a guy I found on craigslist. He was stunned when I told him I was buying the set to use with a loom. :-) Kati Meek's live weight tension is magical, and I'm looking forward to trying it with some substantial weight that will be easier to manipulate than jugs of water.

Off I go..........

Judging

2008-07-08T07:06:00.000-07:00

The topic of judging has popped up in several places lately, so I've been thinking about it a lot.

A guild member sent me an email recently, expressing concern that one of the items which won an award in the fair was not an original design - that she remembered later that she had seen it on the cover of a weaving book. She wondered whether something that was not original should be so honored. I replied, saying that in my opinion, the fair has never really been about totally original designs (at least, not in the Home Arts Division, which is where they put spinning and weaving and knitting and sewing and quilting and embroidery and lacemaking and basketry and pottery.) In this arena, excellence of execution is the main focus. You even see lots of items made from kits, so they are definitely not original designs.

There are, however, other venues where it is indeed not kosher to submit items that were copied. The main one that comes to mind is Showcase - an exhibit associated every two years with the southern California regional weaving/spinning conference. This is sponsored by the Association of Southern California Handweavers, ASCH, and each guild that is part of the coalition gets to submit a number of items to Showcase based on the size of the guild. The items that get submitted are "juried" by the guild, meaning that they are set out on tables and members get to vote on which items they think should make it. I do recall one time when a beautifully woven item was submitted, and in retrospect, it probably shouldn't have been, because it was woven exactly like an item in Weavers Magazine. On the other hand, what constitutes an original design? Many people could converge on the same weave structure, without necessarily having copied anything or anyone. Who judges that?

The truth of the matter is that judging is subjective, and is based on the guidelines given the judge, along with his/her own personal filters of perception. So perhaps the key is not to take any of it too seriously, and definitely not to allow yourself to take offense.

I learned years ago that I personally do not want to be a judge. I was asked to be one of the judges for a sample exchange at a conference. I was flattered to be asked. As I gazed across the tables of samples I felt a little overwhelmed. Some of them were exquisite, some didn't appeal to me. I was required to methodically examine each one, giving it points in different categories. As I did this, I commented on some of them. Picking up a piece of satin weave, I commented that it was a bit "sleazy." Now, weavers know what that words means in that context - it means the sett is a little too open and the fabric is not as firm as it should be. Who knows - maybe I was showing off my knowledge of that word, and its frequent application to satin, or maybe it really was sleazy. The main thing I remember is the slight flinch in the hostess, and then realizing that it was her sample. That was the instant in which I promised myself I would never again judge creative activities. I want to be the cheerleader - the enthusiastic supporter who celebrates achievement and passion, not the harsh taskmaster cutting someone off at the knees and finding a loving creation wanting because it doesn't fit my standards.

Back in the late 1960's, when I was in high school, I wrote a poem in a writing class. The title and body of the poem are long gone, but one line has, for some reason, stayed firmly etched in my brain.

For who am I, that could be robed and wizened,
to judge whose sins be worse than mine?

That was written in response to my first dysfunctional relationship, but they were wise words for a young girl, and I wish I had lived by them all these years.

San Diego County Fair

2008-07-05T10:09:00.000-07:00

I debated what to title this, and settled on the simple choice.

On Thursday, Taryl and I went to the San Diego County Fair to demo in the guild booth. (We're both members of San Diego Creative Weavers Guild.) It was okay. I enjoyed weaving on the Baby Wolf for a while. It was threaded for a tartan in 8/2 cotton - colors blue and green with some black and touches of yellow and red. I wove in straight twill - played for a while with changing colors, then got tired of that and settled on using blue weft, but that washed out the warp colors, so I switched to black weft for the remainder of my time at the loom. Part way through our 3 hour shift, Taryl and I switched. The booth has an old Ashford spinning wheel - took me a bit to get situated so treadling was comfortable. The roving supplied was nice soft stuff, though unfortunately had a lot of veggie matter in it, so I paused rather frequently to scrape my fingernail along the length of spun yarn to pop out the crud.

The booth is titled The Zen of 100 Scarves. Nice title. Nice font in the banner. Some really lovely scarves were displayed. My picture chopped off the top banner for my guild. Palomar is our sister guild up in Escondido in the northeastern part of San Diego County.

What were the alternative titles for this post? "Fair Apathy", no "Mapathy" perhaps. "Fair Apathy" could be misunderstood - Is the whole fair apathetic? Just the people working there? Nope, just me, hence "Mapathy" - a contraction of My Apathy because it takes less effort. Why apathy since I did have a good time?

Well, when I joined the guild in the early 90's, demoing at the fair was one of my all time favorite activities. We had a large guild booth, with a table at one side, but with the loom and wheel near the front of the booth where people could see them clearly - they were much more likely to stop and ask questions. Also, the placement we used to have put us in a spot where you could frequently get a nice breeze coming through. Our fair runs from mid June to around July 4th, so cool breezes are much appreciated! But..... the PTB gave our wonderful large booth space away to the machine knitters. We now have a very small booth in the center aisle, surrounded by cabinets. A table almost completely takes up the front of the booth, so the loom and wheel are back behind that. Few breezes unless the door nearby is open, but that's often uncomfortable for the booth across from us with the lovely ladies who knit preemie hats.

For the last few years, I haven't been as enthusiastic about demoing at the guild booth, but since we seldom have much of a celebration on July 4th at our house, I often demo on that day. The first year I did that, I got a bonus - I was able to reuse my parking pass to go back that night and watch the fireworks from the parking lot - very close to where they were being launched. Very loud, but absolutely spectacular. Can't do that anymore - they punch the parking passes now so they can't be reused. This year, someone else had signed up to demo that day. I considered not signing up at all, but waited until they had an almost full slate - and picked a day that was empty which turned out to be July 3rd.

One of the women working at the fair stopped by to complain that we often have volunteers in the morning when there are fewer people who wander through that exhibit and nobody in the afternoon. A few years ago, I suggested that we limit demo hours to noon to 3pm, and then publish that in the fair booklet. Our guild is shrinking, so it's harder to get a full slate of volunteers if we try to have someone there all day. I think we did that one year a while back, and got complaints about that, too. In fact, that might have been the year that caused us to lose our original booth spot.

Enough whining on my part. The booth was nice, and Margaret, the guild member who set everything up, did an absolutely fantastic job. Mostly, it is still a thrill when you recognize that look in someone's eyes as they stop to watch what you are doing - that look that says "Oh my God that is SO cool and that is something I just now realized that I have ALWAYS wanted to do and wow she makes that look easy and I wonder if I could do that?" It's a twinkle, a hopeful gaze, filled with wonder and affection, and it is the reason that, even in my current apathetic state, I still love to demo weaving and spinning.

Home Again

2008-06-28T17:57:00.000-07:00

I'm back in San Diego. Tampa was wonderful and I feel fortified and inspired.

Unfortunately, I don't really have pictures to share. I did not register for Convergence this year - just bought day passes a few days and checked out some of the exhibits and the vendor hall. Since you cannot take pictures in the exhibits anymore, and since I seem to always forget to put the extra battery in my purse anyway, and since I think about taking pictures as it is getting close to time to leave, I don't have much to show.

Favorite exhibits? I enjoyed the small format tapestries in the lobby of the TECO building, even though I had set my reading glasses on the table in the hotel room and didn't have them with me. :-/ I loved the yardage exhibit - a circular area with fabric attached to a rail upstairs and hanging down to the lower level. They had handling pieces on the rail upstairs so you could see the fabric up close and touch. My friends and I thought it would have been a good idea if they had placed the handling pieces across the circle from the yardage they went with - so you could glance from the handling piece to the yardage and back. The other exhibit I really liked was the display of items from the fashion show. Small Expressions, the one I was most looking forward to seeing, was, well, small. A few of the pieces were exquisite. A few puzzled me as to why they were there.

The vendor area had some lovely stuff, and I enjoyed browsing even though my current finances are such that I didn't do much actual shopping. It seemed to me the vendor hall was quite a bit smaller than I've seen at past Convergences, though it has been a long time since I've been to one, so perhaps that has been a gradual change? My first Convergence was Minneapolis, my second and last one was Atlanta. Both seemed huge and crowded. This seemed well organized, but not really crowded at all. It would be interesting to know how many attended. I wonder if the time of year and the state of the economy affected the numbers? It did look like lots of folks were buying, so maybe my perceptions don't reflect the reality of the situation.

I've never been to Tampa before, and found it to be a lovely city with a very nice convention center. The weather wasn't too bad - not as hot as I had anticipated. In fact, I FROZE in the vendor area - something very rare for me. I'm usually the one asking 'Is it hot in here or is it me?' It was my own fault. I was told to bring something in case it was chilly inside, but figured that didn't apply to me. Wrong.

Mostly, though, I got to spend quality time with some of my dearest friends. It's rare for us to meet face to face. We first met each other on the Compuserve Crafts Forum back in the early 1990's. As I've said before, the Forum is long gone, but the friendships continue to grow. The Forum did have a sort of resurrection on ForumsAmerica, though I no longer participate and there are only a few of the old crowd there. I have lots of notebooks of the spinning and weaving and braiding swaps we did years ago in the Forum - makes me smile as I peruse the names of friends I've long ago lost touch with, but can remember the fun and excitement we shared as we explored our crafts together.

It will be interesting to see where Convergence will be held in 2010. Perhaps it will be in the Southwest? I'm amazed that HGA hasn't announced it yet, though perhaps they have and I just haven't heard the news. We'll know when it's history.

Tampa!!!

2008-06-20T10:18:00.000-07:00

No pictures today, but I'm happy-dancing.

Sunday morning I'm leaving to go to Tampa. I'm going to be meeting a group of dear friends - called my Sangha, or alternatively the SOCs - sisters-of-choice. It's been a long time since we've all been together, and one of them I've never met face to face!!! I can hardly wait. We first became friends years ago through the Compuserve Crafts Forum - my first foray into the online fiber world. The Forum is long gone, but the friendships get deeper every year.

I didn't register for Convergence - the plan is to buy day passes so we can see the exhibits and visit the vendor hall. Mostly, I'm just going to spend blissful time with my buddies. :-)

It's hot today in San Diego - an unusual event! I think it's the universe giving me a sneak preview of heat, then the humidity will get added when I get to Florida. I should be able to handle it okay - after all, I grew up in the southeast with hot and humid summers. The difference is that there we had AC everywhere.

Other good news, I have a new job!!! I will start as soon as I get home. I'm very enthusiastic about it - it's a small company with very nice people and a fascinating product. I'll be doing Java GUI development which should be fun, and the best part of all? I'll be working at home. Time to recreate my disciplined lifestyle.

The ironic thing? Here I've had several years home fulltime, but I haven't done much of what I love to do - because time has been spent job searching, and.... spending time weaving or spinning during the day always felt like playing hooky - so to dispell the guilt, I suppose, I just didn't do much of the fun stuff. Now that I will have way less time, I expect to get a lot more done. Aaah, the cosmic ironies of life.

Waiting

2008-05-30T10:52:00.001-07:00

I haven't posted in a while, because I have been waiting..... waiting to actually do something to write about..... waiting for inspiration to hit..... waiting for things to be magically wonderful.

This picture shows a shelf near the ceiling in my room, with the lovely gamp of colors from Lunatic Fringe. I bought this set of cones years ago at a conference, and have moved them around every time I reorganize my stuff. I keep thinking I'll do something wonderful with them, but just like the pristine tablets of paper and nice new sharp pencils that I don't want to use up, the cones sit untouched, if a little dusty, on my shelf.

I know I'm not alone in this. When I was trying out different blog names, a number of them were already used - by blogs that had one post made several years ago. Until you actually post, the future words are all brilliant and insightful.

I guess I'm waiting for the painful stuff to pass, and then everything will be okay. Maybe the answer is to use the painful stuff, to let it inspire me, to transmute it from ickiness to something wonderful. Maybe. I do know that I'm tired of waiting.

Why I Am Fat

2008-05-02T15:14:00.000-07:00

I have solved one of the major mysteries of the universe.

First, let me say that I did accomplish something this week - I did do the spreadsheets for the business idea - complete with a worksheet for startup costs, one for estimated monthly expenses, one for sales projections. Buzz kill, that financial stuff. When I was done, I realized I was nuts to even consider trying to start a retail business, given that I have no experience in the area and I might need to work myself to death just to make enough to live on in southern California.

Friends consoled me with alternatives..... but the rapid stream of "but but but" in my mind was almost louder than the lawnmower outside. I had a stunning realization. I have no desire to run a store at all, I simply wanted a business that would let me be around fiber and have some extra space for a studio. Surely there's an easier way.

In the meantime, I put an entry in my to-do list to use my inherited cone winder to wind a cone of a combo yarn, then wind a warp and get to weaving. Alas, resistance is not futile. Not being sure how to use said cone-winder, I have found a myriad of ways to divert me from the uncertainty...... a trip to the library for a book by Anais Nin (amazingly, I've never read any of her books) and one called The Rough Guide to Blogging (because no activity is easy enough not to require extensive research first and even a cool looking book called DHTML and CSS Advanced because this stuff is very neat even if I have my doubts about returning to programming. And just in case I got too close to actually doing anything, there were the furtive trips to the kitchen for snacks. One little container of applesauce. Righteous and healthy. One large spoon of Nutella. Oops. Or maybe two. The source of belly fat is unbirthed creativity.

On a lighter note, no pun intended, here's a photo of what I see in my bedroom sanctuary when I wake up in the morning.

Fearless

2008-04-22T13:28:00.000-07:00

I've been playing in fantasyland lately........ and it all began with a web site I Stumbled Upon - www.yarniapdx.com. For the last few years, I have not been working fulltime - I've been doing a wide variety of volunteer jobs, but it is time to figure out how to generate an income and become a contributing member of society, rather than a parasite. The search was vaguely dissatisfying - I didn't really want to go back to my previous career. Then I encountered the above mentioned web site.

So, I ... well, I allowed myself to wallow in a fantasy of creating something similar here. I even drove around checking out potential locations. The store that inspired me sells custom created yarns by the pound. "What if I create custom yarns that are sold by the yard rather than by the pound? And hey, maybe the weavers wouldn't want to make custom yarns at all - just be able to wind off exactly what they need for a warp. That would give them a wide variety of fibers and colors to choose from without having to purchase and store a huge stash of cones themselves. "

Normally, a combination of fear and logic would effectively and quite rapidly squelch this impulse. But no...... this one has persisted. The idea has been rolling around in my head for several weeks now, and hasn't gone away. In fact, I've started a business plan, and checked out a bunch of books from the library since I have no experience in retail. I've fantasized about what I could offer besides yarn - including allowing customers to sell their creations on consignment, and having a classroom for teaching fiber classes.

The basics of the business plan have been easy to put in place. Now it's time to work on financial statements, and that will be a challenge. That sort of stuff usually gives me serious headaches, so I will need to push through my resistance and reluctance if this is to happen. It may be that I'm nuts and this won't really happen.

Strangely enough, the topic at my Unity church this week was Spiritually Unstoppable - not letting fear or negative people stop you in your tracks.

"You can conquer almost any fear if you will only make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn't exist anywhere except in the mind."

~ Dale Carnegie

I just hope that this dream will find existence somewhere other than just in my mind as well.